by Douglas Keil ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 14, 2016
A heartwarming fictional tribute to a son’s cancer-free life by a grateful parent.
Awards & Accolades
Our Verdict
GET IT
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Douglas Keil
BOOK REVIEW
by Douglas Keil
by Emmanuel Carrère translated by Linda Coverdale ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2011
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Share your opinion of this book
More by Emmanuel Carrère
BOOK REVIEW
by Emmanuel Carrère ; translated by John Lambert
BOOK REVIEW
by Emmanuel Carrère ; translated by John Lambert
BOOK REVIEW
by Emmanuel Carrère ; translated by John Lambert
by Joan Didion ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 19, 2005
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
Awards & Accolades
National Book Award Winner
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
National Book Critics Circle Finalist
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
Share your opinion of this book
More by Joan Didion
BOOK REVIEW
by Joan Didion
BOOK REVIEW
by Joan Didion
BOOK REVIEW
by Joan Didion
More About This Book
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.