An emotional and difficult remembrance that ultimately acts as a reinforcement of Christian readers’ faith.
A writer struggles to hold her family and faith together in the aftermath of a devastating car accident in this debut memoir.
In 1993, Vasquez met her future husband, Johnny; they married three years later and went on to have a son, Elias, and two daughters, Abigail and Zoeí. For many years they lived as a happy family who had strong ties to their local church. In 2012, Vasquez discovered that she was again pregnant with a boy—just eight months before the fateful day that she watched Abigail, Elias, and Johnny drive off to school; she would never see her family all together again. A head-on collision left Johnny in a coma and Abigail in surgery, which she didn’t survive. After Johnny finally regained consciousness, Vasquez learned that she couldn’t inform him of the terrible loss for fear that the shock would negatively affect his recovery. As Johnny struggled in rehab, Vasquez organized her daughter’s funeral on what would have been her 14th birthday, determined to make the grim occasion into a celebration of life and faith: “Now, I’m envious of her. She is experiencing her great mansion in heaven,” Vasquez writes, developing a theme of positivity in the face of unbelievable tragedy. When Johnny finally returned home, the family struggled to return to normal life and sought ways to turn their tragedy into a testimony of faith. The early portions of Vasquez’s memoir feel rushed and choppy. However, she effectively slows her account down when describing the devastating moments after her daughter’s death, allowing their full emotional impact to come through. For instance, when she ultimately reveals to Johnny that their daughter didn’t survive the crash, Vasquez highlights wrenching details that make the moment feel real and powerful, such as the mute Johnny’s concern for his wife: “After a while, he stopped [crying] and looked at me. Is he mad at me for waiting? He mouthed, ‘Are you okay?’ ” Throughout this memoir, the author’s unrelenting faith and hope manage to bring much needed positivity to a tragic story.
An emotional and difficult remembrance that ultimately acts as a reinforcement of Christian readers’ faith.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-6960-9
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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