A strong, poignant addition to the genre; best for fellow travelers.
A memoir follows a woman’s path through heartache to acceptance and new beginnings after the tragic loss of her young daughter.
During the summer of 2000, Wilcox’s 13-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a rare and extremely aggressive form of bone cancer. Despite intense chemotherapy, radiation, and Elizabeth’s indomitable spirit, she died in early September of the following year. The shocking prognosis of Elizabeth’s 10% chance of survival fractured the author’s already fragile marriage. According to Wilcox, by October 2000, it became painfully clear that her husband, Neville, would not provide the emotional and physical support she, Elizabeth, and the girl’s older sister, Olivia, desperately needed. The author left her husband, and she and the two girls moved into her sister Susie’s home for seven months until Wilcox could purchase a new house. Through articulate, passionate, but never mawkish prose, Part 1 of the book recounts the year leading up to Elizabeth’s death—weeks of powerful chemotherapy alternating with periods at home, moments of respite, and the extraordinary, unfailing help of family and close friends. The author shares the heartbreaking results of Elizabeth’s July 2001 full body scan: “Like an advancing enemy, tumor after tumor invades her lungs, hips, sternum, ribs, and even her skull.” Parts 2 and 3 offer a helpful guide through grief and recovery. Wilcox began a nightly ritual of writing down her feelings and memories, a practice she encourages others to follow as a tool for healing. She returned to work, continued psychotherapy, and found moments of tranquility and joy in nature, which she describes with poetic elegance. And she fell in love. Throughout the moving narrative, Elizabeth shines as a sweet, compassionate, loving young girl, willing to endure frightening rounds of treatments and displaying remarkable courage at the end: “Mommy, I don’t mind that I’m leaving now. That may be very hard for you to hear, but I’ve tried so hard for one year. I’m not scared—it feels like I’m going on a trip. I just don’t know where I’m going.” Notwithstanding a permeating sadness, there are comforting words to be found in these pages.
A strong, poignant addition to the genre; best for fellow travelers.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64742-108-3
Page Count: 168
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An intimate, stirring chronicle.
A daughter’s memories.
Booker Prize–winning Indian novelist Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother. Mary Roy, who raised her two children alone after divorcing her ne’er-do-well husband, was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. In a patriarchal society that oppressed women socially, economically, and legally, she fought to make a life for herself and her family, working tirelessly to become “the owner, headmistress, and wild spirit” of an astoundingly successful school. The schoolchildren respectfully called her Mrs. Roy, and so did Arundhati and her brother. To escape her mother’s demands and tantrums, Arundhati, at age 18, decided to move permanently to Delhi, where she was studying architecture. After a brief marriage to a fellow student, she embarked on a long relationship with a filmmaker, which ignited her career as a writer: screenplays, essays, and at last the novel she titled The God of Small Things. The book became a sensation, earning her money and fame, as well as notoriety: She faced charges of “obscenity and corrupting public morality.” Arundhati sets her life in the context of India’s roiling politics, of which she became an outspoken critic. For many years, she writes, “I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I traveled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-warrior.” Throughout, Mrs. Roy loomed large in her daughter’s life, and her death, in 2022, left the author overcome with grief. “I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her.” Without her, “I didn’t make sense to myself anymore.” Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love.
An intimate, stirring chronicle.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668094716
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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