A straightforward account of childhood abuse and adult reconciliation.
In her first memoir, Marie tells a story of growing up in 1940 and ’50s Canada full of hardship, strength and ultimately forgiveness.
After her mother died and her father proved incapable of caring for children, Marie and her 13 brothers and sisters were placed in an orphanage. She was sent to live with a foster family shortly after her fourth birthday. Her abusive foster mother hit her, and she sometimes suffered beatings for the tiniest infractions. When she turned 11, her father took her in again, but soon he began his own campaign of rape and abuse, claiming that because her body was “malformed” she needed “treatments”—basically a series of molestations that continued through her teenage years. She escaped to a Roman Catholic boarding school where a supportive priest helped Marie confront her father. She remained in the boarding school until she met Ryan, a young Irishman who did his best to help her move on from her past. The two teens married despite the objections of both Marie’s Catholic family and Ryan’s Protestant one. After many years of hard work and raising a family, Marie finally faced her past. She dealt with her alcohol dependency and returned to Montreal to reconcile with her foster mother. The author’s story is harrowing, but she tempers the dark moments with stories about her boarding school roommates, who prove to be great friends; her older brother, Norman, who does his best to shield her from their father; and her young husband, Ryan, who supports her and offers her a new life. Her writing style is simple and direct, and she talks about her family with clarity. The narrative would have benefited from more context; as Marie grows up, and society changes around her, more detail on Montreal’s culture would have deepened the story.
A straightforward account of childhood abuse and adult reconciliation.Pub Date: April 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1300300724
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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