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. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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BOOK REVIEW
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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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This book chronicles the traumatic story of Ahmed, a young Ezidi woman who was abducted by Islamic State group forces from her village in northern Iraq and subsequently forced into sexual slavery.
Ahmed’s ordeal began at age 18, when IS’ army rolled into her native village of Kocho, thwarting her family’s attempt to seek refuge in the surrounding mountains. The village population was promptly split between the men, driven to an unknown fate, and the women and children, rounded up in a nearby school before being forced aboard trucks heading to neighboring Syria. Months of captivity in the most extreme conditions ensued before she was finally sold—alongside Navine, a friend met in captivity, and her nephew, Eivan, who she pretended was her son—to al-Amriki, an American citizen–turned-emir, a high-ranking position in IS’ military hierarchy. In a succession of fortunate circumstances and bold decisions, the trio managed to escape, first from the compound where they were held captive, and then from Syria toward a Turkish refugee camp. Ahmed, reunited with what was left of her family, attempted to heal her wounds and rebuild her life. The first-person narration provides important context for those unfamiliar with the Ezidi. Readers will find it hard not to empathize and be moved by Ahmed’s heart-wrenching ordeal and will likely forgive some of the book’s naïve essentialisms, plot holes, and unfortunate Eurocentrisms.
A grim but worthy read. (authors’ note, map, epilogue) (Nonfiction. 16-adult)Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-77321-235-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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