An unrefined, unpolished story of finding yourself that reads like a cautionary tale.
The confessions of a codependent housewife who stumbled through two failed marriages, raised three kids and overcame cancer to prove her mettle as a wife, mother and survivor.
Finn (Pennies from Heaven, 2013, etc.) employs the well-worn conceit of comparing a person to an onion: To get at some essence requires peeling back layers, even if the process brings tears or, in Finn’s case, blood. With rhetorical questions that hopscotch from one platitude to another and a few curse words thrown in to show realness—“Talk about feeling like a fuckin’ pincushion”—the self-proclaimed wannabe Barbie examines the plastic sheen on her seemingly perfect life: gorgeous husband, expensive clothes, nice cars, etc. These blessings fall away when the facade begins to crack and Finn descends into a hellish inverse of what she wanted, marrying two men both addicted to cocaine and suffering from severe personality disorders; she goes bankrupt while undergoing chemotherapy, after her second husband and business partner stole money from their real estate company. Her self-worth becomes based on her “ability to give, give, and give some more. In other words, I defined myself by the men in my life and lived solely to please them.” She’s also very concerned with her appearance, yet all the time in front of a mirror doesn’t always lead to Finn mustering more self-reflection. Being diagnosed with colon cancer leads her and her family to a complete breakdown. Still, there are some important lessons:Don’t base your life around a doll’s version of perfection; don’t date jerks; don’t continue to date and then marry said jerks; don’t become business partners with your narcissistic, drug-addict husband; don’t keep your children in unhealthy emotional environments; don’t give up; and legalize medical marijuana. Her anecdotes sometimes add color to tired aphorisms, while the lighthearted touch keeps the story from reconciling the emotional weight of her family’s trauma with superficial concepts of what truly matters.
An unrefined, unpolished story of finding yourself that reads like a cautionary tale.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492129936
Page Count: 256
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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