An unsentimental, affecting look at foster care, abuse, and mental illness.
A heart-wrenching memoir recounts two siblings’ upbringing by their abusive adoptive parents and Oregon’s foster-care system.
The children of a paranoid schizophrenic mother and a developmentally challenged father, Hadassah and Ezra split their early years between foster homes and their parents’ unstable household. When their already tenuous living situation was swept up in 1970s-era adoption reform, they were taken from their biological parents and adopted by the Spencer family, who changed their names from Hadassah and Ezra to Heather and Rex. The Spencers were cruel taskmasters, using adoption to gather young laborers for their home, incapable and uninterested in helping with Rex’s developmental disabilities or Heather’s emotional withdrawal after being molested in foster care. This was compounded by the severe beatings and draconian punishments inflicted on the Spencer children, so pitiless that Heather was barely able to protect herself, let alone help her older brother, whose inability to fly under the family’s radar left him locked away in his room, unfed, and living in filth. Heather escaped at 18, finding a measure of stability with an understanding and loving husband. With this support, she reunited with Rex, who rediscovered his faith and professed a personal, literal friendship with Jesus, turning him into an odd but enthusiastic figure of forgiveness in her life. Young’s debut avoids many of the typical pitfalls of an abuse narrative, approaching its often tragic subject matter in a forthright manner, never sensationalizing her own or others’ suffering. Though Mormonism figures prominently here, the Mormon church’s assistance and shortcomings are treated with honesty, and those outside the faith won’t find themselves feeling recruited or ostracized. The book’s heartbreaking power emanates from the author’s candid account of her struggles, from her fear of inheriting her mother’s mental illness or the abusive tendencies of her adoptive parents to dealing with the guilt that comes with sometimes prioritizing one’s own health and survival.
An unsentimental, affecting look at foster care, abuse, and mental illness.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494311162
Page Count: 240
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
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