A restless yet satisfying memoir that will appeal most to women who’ve found themselves fleeing hopeless relationships.
Diary entries from a woman who left her marriage and husband for a freer existence.
Chaplin’s epistolary memoir, extracted from two years of recovered emails and journals she’d kept beginning in 2006, chronicles the dramatic, adventurous, and heartbreaking story of a restless married woman who’d fallen out of love with her husband of 13 years. The author opens with frustration and resentment at her “stoner” spouse, Josh, a formerly athletic Southern California surfer who remained glued to his video games while she wrote about her unhappiness in a secret daybook “to stave off going mad.” The author found catharsis through the “calming logic of language.” Desperate to abandon the rage-filled man she’d known since she was 20, the author eventually separated from him and moved to Dublin to meet her brother, Seth, who was touring with a rock band. In Dublin, Chaplin’s single life bloomed. Excited about the new world her separation inspired, the author writes feverishly of make-out sessions in the streets and of her passionate relationship with sexy Irish lad Kieran. Yet she felt like a “husk” when Josh called, on Christmas Eve, to ask for advice on a new relationship he’d begun with another woman in Los Angeles. Though the gears of this memoir grind a bit too erratically and self-consciously at times, Chaplin voices her intimate thoughts and emotions consistently and urgently enough to capture readers’ attention as well as their sympathy when the author’s free-for-all single life begins to sour. Memories of former happiness with Josh haunted her, and a serious bout of depression followed a spontaneously messy return to Ireland in an attempt to make miracles happen with the philandering Kieran. This a breezy, compelling slice of reality, as Chaplin openly shares her trials with a “freedom and exaltation such as I’d never known, as well as darkness that threatened to bury me.”
A restless yet satisfying memoir that will appeal most to women who’ve found themselves fleeing hopeless relationships.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3499-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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