A coming-of-age drama captured through poetic prose and convincing honesty.
A modeling industry trailblazer and former Olympic swimmer recounts her troubled girlhood.
In her debut, Legler passionately relives her years in Europe and stateside. She was born to expatriate American parents who, despite a disintegrating marriage, struggled to raise her and her siblings. Restless and lonely, the uncommonly tall girl found solace and purpose in swimming. She quickly developed great skill and dexterity, which positioned her for greatness as her strength and determination grew with regular training sessions. The author swam competitively in her early teens as she navigated simmering hormones, smitten boys, and the abusive, predatory physician treating her scoliosis. Legler’s lyrically descriptive prose glides across childhood anecdotes of her first swimming attempt as well as awkward sexual interludes as she strained to discover her identity and a place of her own among her classmates. She shows the precarious balancing act that ensued between her rigorous training sessions at the pool and the soft-core rebellion of teenage life and the struggle to fit in: “I have a swim meet the next day but I’ll get drunk anyway so that I can crawl on the couch with the rest of them. And I do. And it feels good. And I am beautiful.” The author also began to embrace the first sparks of attraction to other girls while exploring her desires with men. Then she shifted her focus to qualifying for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. She intricately describes every nuance of the competitive experience alongside her personal self-discovery and experimentation with sex, alcohol, and procuring drugs for her fellow teammates. Legler decorates each of her adventures with urgency and lively, only occasionally strained poetic expression. Readers familiar with the author know she has grown past the dark days described in this memoir to become a unique fashion model, social justice activist, and successful entrepreneur. This focused attention on her youthful turmoil represents a significant need for blissful catharsis.
A coming-of-age drama captured through poetic prose and convincing honesty.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3575-0
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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