A frank and often affecting memoir from a mother determined to do whatever it takes for her child.
Parenting a sick child takes a couple to the edge and back.
No one wants to hear that their child has a life-threatening illness which, if left unattended, could considerably shorten the child’s life. But if faced with such horrible news, one hopes to have the support and love of the other parent to help make decisions and get through the rough spots. In playwright Harpham’s emotion-packed memoir about her sick daughter, Gracie, she examines the conflicted feelings she had toward Brian, Gracie’s father, as the two navigated the complex world of a seriously ill child. Since Brian was not there for her during the pregnancy, the author wasn’t able to trust that he would continue to be there through the numerous blood transfusions that Gracie required. Readers see her open her heart and world to Brian only to clamp down when she gets nervous or scared, reacting perhaps to the semichaotic echoes of her own childhood that still tug on her emotionally. The author does justice to Brian’s love and affections, painting a well-rounded picture of a man who wants the best for his family as well as time and space for himself and his work as a writer. Throughout, Harpham provides detailed information about Gracie’s condition, which builds tension and anxiety as readers wonder if this little girl will ever get the medical treatment she needs to beat her disease. The author also discusses the other parents she befriended in the hospital, many of whose children also had serious illnesses. Although a personal story, Harpham’s memoir provides a larger, universal picture of unconditional love toward a child and the push-pull of an adult relationship and all its inherent highs and lows.
A frank and often affecting memoir from a mother determined to do whatever it takes for her child.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-13156-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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