A poignant breath of fresh air for those who struggled—or are struggling—with the dramedy of early adulthood.
A Sunday Times columnist draws her coming-of-age story with tender flair.
“We were the worst type of students imaginable. We were reckless and self-absorbed and childish and violently carefree. We were Broken Britain,” writes Alderton, a TV writer and co-host of the podcast The High Low, in this incisive tribute to women’s friendships. The collection gathers essays from a variety of eras of her life: her teen years, when she attended an all-girls school, cemented her fascination with boys, and dreamed about being a grown-up (“I was desperate to be an adult”); her chaotic 20s, which proved some of her fantasies wrong; and the dawning of her 30s, when she found some semblance of wisdom. The narrative is also a splendid mashup of recipes (“hangover mac and cheese”), hyperbolic group e-mails mocking the smugness of the coupled and the resentment of singles; and lively recollections on everything from awkward online encounters to body image and blackout drunkenness. Alderton paints British suburbia in hypercolor while drawing herself as a woman who’s prone to excess. How her view of love matured is steeped in anxious charm, striking a clever balance between painful humor and self-forgiveness. “Dating had become a source of instant gratification, an extension of narcissism, and nothing to do with connection with another person,” she writes. “Time and time again, I had created intensity with a man and confused it with intimacy.” But it’s the author’s relationship with best friend Farly—“there isn’t a pebble on the beach of my history that she has left unturned. She knows where to find everything in me and I know where all her stuff is too”—that inspires the most poetic passages. Whether excavating the turmoil of seeing Farly fall in love and get her heart broken, writing about the significance of her support when Farly’s sister died, or revisiting the many everyday moments that have made up their 20 years together, Alderton’s portrait exemplifies love.
A poignant breath of fresh air for those who struggled—or are struggling—with the dramedy of early adulthood.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296878-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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