Not without its flaws but an inspiring memoir of absolute determination.
A memoir of a mother and her children building a house—and security—from the ground up.
Throughout her uplifting book, Brookins, a computer analyst, social media marketing expert, and author of middle-grade and young-adult novels (Gadget Geeks, 2015, etc.), consistently displays her relentless optimism. The author begins with the birth of her first child when she was 19. A child of divorce and married at 18, Brookins was confident that she could carry her child—soon to be children—away from the romantic problems that plagued her. These relationships were hobbled by various factors, including schizophrenia, drugs, and, finally, abuse. Brookins successfully extricated herself from her partner’s abuse, but the trauma and anxiety of his return, along with financial hardship, left Brookins with no choice but to move on. Unsure of what to do next, the author eventually hit on the idea of building a house with her children. “The idea of building our own home was not born out of boredom,” she writes, “but rose as the only possible way to rebuild my shattered family while we worked through the shock waves of domestic violence and mental illness. The dangers of our past were more difficult to leave behind than we ever imagined.” Despite the seemingly insurmountable odds, Brookins and her children waded into battle repeatedly, measuring, ordering, hammering, pouring concrete, and pulling apart finished work to put it back together again only to find the one thing they had counted on going right had gone wrong. The author occasionally characterizes her children in ways that make them seem like caricatures rather than individuals trying to work through the instability and uncertainty. However, when she turns the focus on their work, Brookins draws a compelling picture of overcoming adversity and battling against problems from the past that continued to threaten the new life they built.
Not without its flaws but an inspiring memoir of absolute determination.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-09566-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
