A heartwarming fictional tribute to a son’s cancer-free life by a grateful parent.
Keil’s (The Girl in the Freezer, 2016, etc.) novel, inspired by true events, tells the story of a teenager’s battle with cancer, as told through impassioned letters to his father.
The author offers a moving, inspired fictionalized re-creation of his 14-year-old son Dustin’s treatment for leukemia more than three decades ago. (The book was written shortly after Dustin was discharged from the hospital, and he’s now in remission.) As an “absent father living in another part of the country” when his son received the diagnosis, Keil says that he found the imaginative writing process to be a powerful kind of therapy. The book begins with Dustin writing a letter to his father, shortly after he’s admitted to the hospital. The missives become more engaged, impassioned, and searingly poignant as the story progresses and the direness of Dustin’s situation begins to sink in. The author consistently demonstrates a talent for portraying the voice and wide-eyed perspective of a teen facing the most trying time of his young life. Dustin’s mother, who initially finds it difficult to even face her son in his hospital bed, is portrayed with grace and striking compassion. Overall, Keil’s imagined depiction of his son’s ordeal comes across as profoundly genuine, and it will be eye-opening for readers who are unfamiliar with grueling chemotherapy treatments; it portrays Dustin’s aversion to needle sticks, his blunt confusion and mounting, displaced anger at his diagnosis, and his blind fear of a hospital stay. Some of the descriptions of medical procedures, even from Dustin’s uninitiated vantage point, will be challenging reading for the faint of heart. The epistolary quality of the narrative impressively and vibrantly encapsulates its protagonist’s emotions and trepidations as he is surrounded by doctors and nurses, deals with cold rooms and intimidating, mysterious smells and sounds, and grapples with an illness that, for a teen, is nearly impossible to comprehend. The story is suitable for both adult and YA readers, and it will be particularly instructive for newly diagnosed leukemia patients.
A heartwarming fictional tribute to a son’s cancer-free life by a grateful parent.Pub Date: March 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5229-7676-9
Page Count: 216
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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