A pointed, intelligently told story of a family accepting loss gracefully.
When a child dies, her immediate family members face grief, longing and rebuilding in this true story.
Flohr’s daughter Sarah was 16 when she died due to a freak car accident. The moment was devastating to her family, particularly her identical twin, Caiti. Yet every member of Sarah’s extended clan—including her divorced parents, her stepfather, her elementary school–aged brother and her grandparents—was left wondering how to restart his or her life after the trauma. The author felt this pain more acutely than most; her so-called “failures” as a parent and Sarah’s tempestuous nature clashed often, and she found peace elusive. She tries to piece together Sarah’s thoughts in the days and weeks before her death in this book and struggles to understand her grief process by taking a bird’s eye view of it. “ ‘There’s been an accident, and Sarah has been killed.’ The tears begin at that moment,” she writes. “I couldn’t know then that they would flow for the next five years, every day, and every night.” Although her loss was profound, the author managed to put herself outside her own sadness to take care of the tasks at hand: burying her child, repairing the damage to her second marriage, and raising two baby daughters and a son. On the edge of the story is the dazed Caiti, who wanders like a ghost throughout the narrative. The book is most compelling when we see Sarah’s side of the story, whether through her own writings or the author’s imagined play-by-play of her decision to get into that car on that summer night. The story honestly depicts a real family; the author doesn’t sugarcoat the ugliness of divorce or the anger of miscommunication. The book also provides no grand “life lesson,” which works in its favor. It shows that Sarah’s decision to get into that car that night wasn’t an act of rebellion; she was just a teen in search of food and adventure. Such a book on one’s nightstand, particularly if one is in the midst of the grieving process, could offer solace in a way that fiction never could.
A pointed, intelligently told story of a family accepting loss gracefully.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-940598-15-4
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Book Publishers Network
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2014
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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