Harrowing.
A highly personal and deeply discomforting memoir of neglect and abuse.
Kuts grew up never knowing want; her parents provided for every need, lavishing her with toys and encouraging her interest in art. But not all was as it seemed; behind closed doors, Kuts’ mother disciplined her with harsh spankings that evolved into beatings. After her parents’ divorce, Kuts’ home life unraveled—the kitchen cupboards went barren, her clothes became threadbare and, most devastatingly, her mother lost interest in parenting. By the age of 12, when the memoir begins, the author is starving, routinely panhandling and stealing from neighbors to quiet her hunger. The home she shares with her brother and neglectful mother, who has taken up inappropriate relationships with teenage boys, is no refuge—parties rage at all hours and drug use is rampant. Kuts battles addiction, survives sexual assault and defends herself against torment, both psychological and physical, at the hands of her mother. The narrative follows the family as it moves from California to Oregon, where Kuts finds herself in an even worse predicament. The extent of the neglect, as well as the horrific depictions of starvation, is almost unfathomable and the description of her abuse is heartbreaking. The fact that Kuts grew from a nearly illiterate child to an accomplished wordsmith in just a dozen year attests to her resilience. She is still very close to her story; though she tells it from a distance of decades, her pain still feels fresh. The meandering book runs long (and remains unfinished—a sequel, Please Don’t Love Me, is to pick up where this book ends), and the real question—why Kuts’ mother turned into a monster—is never resolved. But the book succeeds as therapy for its author—and a reminder to its readers to value the simple things, like shelter, sustenance and familial love.
Harrowing.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1438212197
Page Count: 354
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
