Martin seldom goes deep, but the arc of growing self-awareness lends the story both gravity and an odd appeal.
A portrait of the artist as a moody teen.
“When someone suggested I was cool,” writes Martin (Mickey, 2016, etc.) by way of introduction, “I couldn’t help but think, What the fuck is your problem?” It’s a good organizing question as, at only 30, the author takes a hard look at her youth, chronicling the tumult and hardship that modern American life visits on the young, thanks mostly to the regrettable behavior of grown-ups who are scarcely grown themselves: "Seth and my mom fought a lot. Yelling and stomping around, mostly, but sometimes the fights became physically aggressive, and they would throw things or grab each other or make physical threats.” Readers might rightly be flummoxed, in any event, at a book that opens with a confession to having a first sexual experience at the age of 6, courtesy of a terrible slasher/horror film: “I attributed it to Chucky,” Martin writes matter-of-factly, “the evil sentient doll.” The author recounts a life alternately spent alone in her bedroom, making mix tapes and collages (“I knew I had something to say, but I didn’t trust myself to find the right way to say it yet”), and being wistfully, self-doubtfully in love with boys who didn’t know she existed. In other words, it’s the sort of thing with which any sensitive reader who has suffered through adolescence will feel sympathetic recognition. The story levels off in early adulthood, with still more confusions and failings and clumsy moments: “I mostly wanted to eat Jeppe’s burger, because Ian had ordered his with mayonnaise and I hated mayonnaise, but I couldn’t pass up the thrill of eating from two men’s burgers at the same time.” That episode ends on a note of furious discovery that is unexpected but entirely appropriate.
Martin seldom goes deep, but the arc of growing self-awareness lends the story both gravity and an odd appeal.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59376-677-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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