A compelling and upsetting account of an abusive relationship.
A debut memoir recounts a woman’s escape and recovery from a harrowing marriage.
In 1981, at the age of 19, Katchastarr was raped by her ex-boyfriend Phidelopé (a fictional name) after she invited him over for a friendly dinner. Instead of reporting the rape to the police, the author simply went to work, more concerned about losing her job than she was about bringing Phidelopé to justice: “I kept to myself those following weeks, healing my aching body; tending to self-care; installing a bolt lock, chain lock, and new key lock to the door of my apartment; and praying I would never see him again.” Katchastarr was not so lucky. When he learned that she was pregnant, Phidelopé asked her to marry him—at gunpoint. He warned that if she tried to report the rape, abort the child, or live her life without him, he would kill her and her family. She went along with it, marrying and moving in with him, hoping to somehow find a way to appease his anger and build a normal, stable life. Phidelopé continued to be violent and sexually abusive to the author and the couple’s two daughters, to the point where Katchastarr finally worked up the courage to leave. Unfortunately, the damage done by her husband would haunt her long after they were no longer under the same roof. With a grim sense of self-reflection, Katchastarr (a pseudonym) documents her years of abuse in simple but powerful prose: “I really thought he was going to kill my dad as he stood over him, proudly pointing the gun at him and demanding that he and my mother mind their own business and insisting that they stay out of our lives forever.” The author’s decision to italicize Phidelopé’s pronouns doesn’t work quite the way she wants it to (they read as emphatic rather than othering), and a bit more background information for the book’s key characters would have been helpful for context. But in general, Katchastarr’s story is affecting and engaging, and readers should be deeply interested in how she managed to pull herself out of a situation that can only be described as nightmarish.
A compelling and upsetting account of an abusive relationship.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-8392-9
Page Count: 126
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
