A powerful story of a survivor whose irrepressible personality shines throughout even her darkest moments.
Etler’s follow-up to her memoir, The Dead Inside (2017), charts her rocky high school years, fresh out of tough-love rehab.
When Cyndy Etler was 14, her mother sent her to Straight, Inc., an abusive rehab facility where she was brainwashed into believing that she was an addict, although she had only tried pot several times. After spending 16 months locked up, Cyndy is returned to her former life to find herself the “only clean and sober student” at Masuk High School. She feels intensely isolated from her peers, doing her best to maintain a low profile while tending to her sobriety. She takes comfort from attending various AA meetings and grasps desperately at whatever shreds of love and acceptance she can snatch, including a friendship with a sober friend that turns toxic and a string of fleeting, fraught encounters with boys that leave her feeling as unwanted as ever. Loneliness gives way to depression, which she eventually learns to combat with the help of a psychiatrist and an English teacher who encourages her to write. Etler’s gutsy present-tense narration of her feelings of insecurity and isolation is interwoven with the sublime moments of joy she experiences in music, in writing, and in her relationships; her prose dazzles with infectious verve.
A powerful story of a survivor whose irrepressible personality shines throughout even her darkest moments. (author’s note) (Memoir. 15-adult)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4926-3576-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Skilled and graceful exploration of the soul of an astonishing human being.
Full-immersion journalist Kidder (Home Town, 1999, etc.) tries valiantly to keep up with a front-line, muddy-and-bloody general in the war against infectious disease in Haiti and elsewhere.
The author occasionally confesses to weariness in this gripping account—and why not? Paul Farmer, who has an M.D. and a Ph.D. from Harvard, appears to be almost preternaturally intelligent, productive, energetic, and devoted to his causes. So trotting alongside him up Haitian hills, through international airports and Siberian prisons and Cuban clinics, may be beyond the capacity of a mere mortal. Kidder begins with a swift account of his first meeting with Farmer in Haiti while working on a story about American soldiers, then describes his initial visit to the doctor’s clinic, where the journalist felt he’d “encountered a miracle.” Employing guile, grit, grins, and gifts from generous donors (especially Boston contractor Tom White), Farmer has created an oasis in Haiti where TB and AIDS meet their Waterloos. The doctor has an astonishing rapport with his patients and often travels by foot for hours over difficult terrain to treat them in their dwellings (“houses” would be far too grand a word). Kidder pauses to fill in Farmer’s amazing biography: his childhood in an eccentric family sounds like something from The Mosquito Coast; a love affair with Roald Dahl’s daughter ended amicably; his marriage to a Haitian anthropologist produced a daughter whom he sees infrequently thanks to his frenetic schedule. While studying at Duke and Harvard, Kidder writes, Farmer became obsessed with public health issues; even before he’d finished his degrees he was spending much of his time in Haiti establishing the clinic that would give him both immense personal satisfaction and unsurpassed credibility in the medical worlds he hopes to influence.
Skilled and graceful exploration of the soul of an astonishing human being.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50616-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
A startling series of testimonies about urban violence from New York City teens. These first-person essays on sociological issues first appeared in New Youth Connection, a newspaper for and by students of New York City high schools. By choosing the best essays on the theme of violence, the editors have compiled a book more eloquent than a thousand police reports. For the writers live in housing projects; they know violence all too well. So why do kids kill each other? In their own words, “Kids nowadays are ready to kill . . . over the dumbest things.” You’ll hear talk of trafficking in gold chains—one young man is stabbed for a good fake. Yet the cause of violence is rarely just material. Instead, it erupts when one gets —dissed— (disrespected) too often in a life where to hold onto a shred of dignity is rare. To their credit, two of the teenage boys here write about why they will not pack a pistol: because they’ve seen innocent loved ones get killed, and because it gives the owner a dangerously distorted sense of power. While all the killing seems to involve young men who treat life “like a reset button in a video game,” some of the most abused victims are the young women in their lives—or, in one case, a homosexual young man who cannot take part in their bad-mustached, bad-mouthed behavior. Among the women, one Chinese girl, not dressed provocatively enough to earn the usual stream of catcalls from the corner full of unemployed truants, is angry enough to say, after a bottle is thrown at her, that it’s as though a female in the city “has a bullseye on her body.” Unheard voices crying for a hearing.
Pub Date: Aug. 20, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83754-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
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