From five to 18, Cory Friedman was prescribed over 30 different medications to control obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette’s syndrome. He battled addiction, learning difficulties and tics before embarking on a wilderness retreat and an intensive school process. Working from Cory’s recollections, family medical records and observations, Patterson and Friedman (Cory’s father) create a rich and engaging first-person narrative based on the co-authors’ previous work, Against Medical Advice (2008). Readers will wonder about some of the Friedmans’ parenting choices, especially as Cory’s behavior gets more extreme; a showdown over smoking at school, for example, may generate very little sympathy. There is a plethora of additional content: family photographs, medicine logs, question-and-answer sessions with both Cory and his father and a brief guide to mental-health resources. A perfect prescription for misery-memoir maniacs. (Memoir. YA)
Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-07617-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
To be published twice a year, the inaugural issue of this journal of YA literature includes essays, short stories, poetry, artwork, and excerpts from novels. Just the first page of Cart’s introduction hypes the volume as eclectic, innovative, cutting-edge, risk-taking, fresh, original, and provocative. Such promotion is unnecessary, as it is, indeed, a solid collection. Each issue will have a different theme; this time it’s sin. The nonfiction stars here. Marc Aronson’s superb essay on the Salem witch trials will send readers to his new work Witch-Hunt (2003), and Hazel Rochman’s “What Would I Have Done?” is an excellent introduction to the range of writing on the Holocaust. The fiction is consistently strong, examining the many faces of sin, and Sonya Sones’s subtly erotic “Massage” is the best of the poems. The art is provocative if not especially appealing. Nothing on the cover indicates the audience, so perhaps this fine journal will also find itself in the hands of adults. (notes on the contributors) (Anthology. YA)
Pub Date: April 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-73031-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
The power of this bittersweet, small volume lies in its precise limning of how a child perceives and experiences the emotions of separation, divorce, and stepfamilies. Appelt only gives us her side, but it is a pure and vivid one: her dad writing letters from Arabia, where he has worked for years; her dad coming home, but to another family, not hers with her mother and her sisters. The brief vignettes illuminate like lightning in a darkened room—not quite poetry, but too compressed to be prose, exactly. She spins her sentences from summers at her father’s house to life at her mother’s; from the time “before” when they believed he would come home, to the remembered present, when they knew he wouldn’t. Most of this takes place during the 1960s, and historical and musical events track the period. Family photographs exactly reflect the passionate resonance of the text. (Memoir. YA)
Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7362-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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