A well-crafted memoir that creates meaning by drawing medical connections.
In her debut, Rosenhaupt tells stories of her family’s neurological emergencies, focusing on her son’s recovery after an accident.
In October 1998, the author’s son, a Harvard University student who loved rock climbing and ultimate Frisbee, crossed a highway late one night while wearing dark clothes and was struck by a car. The driver wasn’t speeding, she says; it was merely unfortunate timing. Her son became one of the 1.7 million cases of traumatic brain injury reported annually, and he was the youngest neurological patient at the New England Rehabilitation Hospital, where he spent 22 days instead of a projected six to eight weeks. Rosenhaupt recognizes how lucky her son was to have made such rapid progress: he could shower unaided, take walks with others, and even prepare breakfast as a rite of graduating from rehab. Moreover, his mind was so minimally affected that he was able to complete his folklore and mythology degree, even studying in Cuba for his senior thesis. This is not a tidy story of perfect restoration, however, and Rosenhaupt bravely chronicles her son’s setbacks and probes the cruel coincidences of her own experience. It wasn’t her first encounter with brain injury, after all; two decades earlier, her father fell off a bicycle and hit his head, and although surgeries gave him some good years, he later experienced dementia. Also, her husband experienced transient global amnesia, her mother suffered from Parkinson’s disease, and she fractured her own skull only 10 weeks before her son’s accident. At times it feels as if this book is merely an account of one medical crisis after another, but thanks to the author’s skips back and forth in time and flashbacks to normal life in Santa Fe, it’s no dull, chronological narrative. Passages from Rosenhaupt’s notebooks, letters, and emails aid the graceful reconstruction of scenes. The language is simple but heartfelt: “We never talk about what we fear most. We don’t fall apart. We are holding our breath.” Most chapters are headed by apt poetic epigraphs; as a former poetry editor and English teacher, Rosenhaupt knows literature’s power to soothe.
A well-crafted memoir that creates meaning by drawing medical connections.Pub Date: June 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9836980-2-9
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Peninsula Road Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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