A heartfelt, unflinchingly honest account of a complex relationship.
In this debut memoir, an unnamed woman battles cancer while navigating an abusive relationship.
Chastain’s tale weaves back and forth through time, emotion and her protagonist’s life with her moody, charming and explosive husband. The most surprising thing about the man who dominates the narrator’s thoughts—who’s loving one moment, violent and inscrutable the next—is how little her cancer diagnosis influences his behavior. At one point, she asks her husband, “I wonder how you would have felt if someone you really loved had gotten cancer?”—one of the many hard-hitting emotional moments that punctuate the winding story. Through a blend of literary devices, in competent, artistic prose, Chastain vividly portrays her character’s self-doubt and bravery, as well as the unpredictable world in which she lives. The presence of the domestic—houses, baseball, clothes—alongside the metaphysical realities of illness, violence and love creates an engaging tension that will likely grip readers’ hearts and imaginations. The author’s decision not to name her main characters is intriguing but somewhat confusing, especially when she later names her characters’ mysteriously absent sons and family. Readers see into the characters’ hearts, but never learn enough real-world details to know much about them; similarly, while the narrator’s experience is certainly realistic, she and her husband lack a clear, satisfying character arc, and the end comes too suddenly and neatly. Despite this, Chastain’s searing and emotional look at intimate-partner violence is often heartbreaking, riveting and terrifying. Readers will likely find themselves rooting for the protagonist to leave her husband one minute and hoping she stays with him the next—embodying the tension felt by the characters in this thoughtful work.
A heartfelt, unflinchingly honest account of a complex relationship.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615628110
Page Count: 410
Publisher: Santiago Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2013
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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