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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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