Gentle words of wisdom from a woman driven by "senseless, relentless hope.”
A wife and mother's reflections on being imperfect and loving it.
When people from her church started telling blogger and momastery.com founder Melton that she and her family seemed so "perfect," she was dismayed. Rather than continue to let others believe that she led a trouble-free life, the author decided to become "a reckless truth-teller." In a memoir that is also an inspirational guide to daily living, Melton tells the story of how she learned to carry on through the inevitable trials of living "without armor and without weapons.” For two decades, she writes, "I was lost to food and booze and bad love and drugs." Her problems with alcohol and drugs led to arrests, a criminal record and difficulties getting a job. Although she was happily married, Melton's relationship with her husband had begun as a result of "confusing sex with love, and [winding] up pregnant." Then one day she was diagnosed with Lyme disease. Melton credits a deep faith in God as well as strong connections with her family as being the cornerstones of her personal success. But as with everything else, learning to make those relationships work was a daily challenge. As a wife, Melton had to be willing to not only understand her husband's needs, but be honest about her own and find effective ways to communicate them. As a mother, she had to learn to forgive herself for allowing her anxieties "to pour out like gasoline on [the] raging fire" of her children's tantrums and other difficult behaviors. Only by living in a state of loving vulnerability would she be able to do what she desired most: touch others and be touched by them in return.
Gentle words of wisdom from a woman driven by "senseless, relentless hope.”Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9724-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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