A vivid depiction of grief alongside a creative, if well-worn, picture of heaven.
An imaginative debut novel about a deceased teenager’s adventures in the afterlife, contrasted with her mother’s struggles back on Earth.
In an introduction, Moore (Nursing/Vanderbilt Univ.) says that she started keeping a diary after her daughter Cassandra’s suicide as a way of processing her feelings. Five years later, as she began turning her diary into a fictionalized memoir, she realized she was “just writing half of the story,” so she used “automatic writing” in an attempt to access her daughter’s narration. The resulting novel therefore offers a thinly veiled account of Moore’s own grief journey. In the novel, Callie Murray, 16, has been in a rebellious phase, drinking at parties and doing drugs with her boyfriend. One morning, her mother, Diane, finds her lying on her bedroom floor, eyes open and lips blue. Although Diane, a nurse, performs CPR, it’s too late; Callie had taken an overdose of antidepressant pills, and police find a suicide note. In an afterlife realm known as Summer Wind, Callie states, “I was in a vast, emerald-green meadow strewn with purple wildflowers.” She soon meets her great-grandmother Ellie, who explains that Callie can’t return to Earth, but she does give her a screen on which to watch her mother. Callie also meets Seraphiel, a guardian angel who will take her on a “journey of self-discovery” to understand her emotional pain so that she can be reincarnated. As depicted here, Summer Wind is described capably, but it does offer some clichés, such as Seraphiel’s “gleaming white fortress” and reunions with deceased pets. That said, both main characters undertake convincing and colorful journeys of learning and healing in first-person sections that cover about five years. In them, Callie tells of her new existence on the other side, and Diane continues her everyday earthly life while also looking for ways to continue interacting with Callie through dreams, mediums, and an Angel Awakening class; at one point, spiritual healer Joy, transmitting a message from Seraphiel, tells Diane: “Let Callie go to dwell inside you as a part of you, not separate from you.”
A vivid depiction of grief alongside a creative, if well-worn, picture of heaven.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61852-120-0
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Turning Stone Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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