A detailed look at a complex, sometimes-harrowing adoption experience.
A woman chronicles her and her husband’s journey to adopt a child in China.
Reicher (Reaching God’s Perfection, 2014), a former U.S. Marine and massage therapist, writes that she always wanted to have a family, but after a series of physical ailments (including removal of a gland following an infection), she and her husband, Norm, realized that they couldn’t naturally conceive. Reicher felt that she was “born with such an urge to rescue and be responsible,” and she and her husband decided to adopt a Chinese child. The pair traveled to Changsha, the province where their baby was born and where they would have to live for five days before the adoption could be finalized. Reicher describes her time in China in detail, including meeting her translator, Samuel, who guided her through the adoption process and whose “kindness, willingness, understanding and patience was unfathomable.” The couple finally met their new baby, whom they named Sarah QiQi. Sarah turned out to be very ill when Reicher and her husband first encounter her, so they oversaw her medical care at the orphanage. As Reicher told her family, “I could not turn down a baby. That would be ridiculous,” and she held true to that sentiment, diligently nursing her baby back to health. Overall, this is not a story that delves into the personalities of the people involved; indeed, readers don’t learn very much about either Reicher or her spouse. Rather, it’s centered on the nuts and bolts of a specific adoption, and, as such, it’s an illuminating look at an adoption process abroad. As a result, the narration consists mostly of summary, with some occasional dialogue sprinkled in, which gives the story a fast pace. At the same time, though, it often results in a lack of atmospheric and emotional description.
A detailed look at a complex, sometimes-harrowing adoption experience.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5425-9908-5
Page Count: 194
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.
The bestselling author recalls her childhood and her family’s wartime experiences.
Readers of Winspear’s popular Maisie Dobbs mystery series appreciate the London investigator’s canny resourcefulness and underlying humanity as she solves her many cases. Yet Dobbs had to overcome plenty of hardships in her ascent from her working-class roots. Part of the appeal of Winspear’s Dobbs series are the descriptions of London and the English countryside, featuring vividly drawn particulars that feel like they were written with firsthand knowledge of that era. In her first book of nonfiction, the author sheds light on the inspiration for Dobbs and her stories as she reflects on her upbringing during the 1950s and ’60s. She focuses much attention on her parents’ lives and their struggles supporting a family, as they chose to live far removed from their London pasts. “My parents left the bombsites and memories of wartime London for an openness they found in the country and on the land,” writes Winspear. As she recounts, each of her parents often had to work multiple jobs, which inspired the author’s own initiative, a trait she would apply to the Dobbs character. Her parents recalled grueling wartime experiences as well as stories of the severe battlefield injuries that left her grandfather shell-shocked. “My mother’s history,” she writes, “became my history—probably because I was young when she began telling me….Looking back, her stories—of war, of abuse at the hands of the people to whom she and her sisters had been billeted when evacuated from London, of seeing the dead following a bombing—were probably too graphic for a child. But I liked listening to them.” Winspear also draws distinctive portraits of postwar England, altogether different from the U.S., where she has since settled, and her unsettling struggles within the rigid British class system.
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64129-269-6
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A somber, sage book about art-making that deserves a readership beyond Cave’s fan base.
The Australian alt-rock icon talks at length about the relationship between faith, death, and art.
Like many touring musicians stalled during the pandemic, Cave pursued an autobiographical book project while in quarantine. But rather than write a standard memoir, he instead consented to a book of extensive interviews with U.K. arts journalist O’Hagan, photography critic for the Guardian and a feature writer for the Observer. Cave chose this approach in order to avoid standard rock-star patter and to address grittier, more essential matters. On that front, he has plenty of material to work with. Much of the book focuses on his 15-year-old son Arthur, who died from an accidental fall off a cliff in 2015. The loss fueled Cave’s 2019 album, Ghosteen, but Cave sees the connection between life and art as indirect, involving improvisation, uncertainty, and no small amount of thinking about religion. “The loss of my son is a condition; not a theme,” he tells O’Hagan. Loss is a constant in these conversations—during the period when they were recorded, Cave’s mother also died, as did his former band mate Anita Lane. Yet despite that, this is a lively, engrossing book energized by Cave’s relentless candor—and sometimes counterintuitive thinking—about his work and his demons. His well-documented past heroin addiction, he says, “fed into my need for a conservative and well-ordered life.” Grief, he suggests, is surprisingly clarifying: “We become different. We become better.” Throughout, he talks about the challenges and joys of songwriting and improvisation (mostly around Carnage, the 2021 album he recorded with band mate Warren Ellis during this period) and about the comfort he gets answering questions from fans and strangers on his website. O’Hagan knows Cave’s work well, but he avoids fussy discographical queries and instead pushes Cave toward philosophical elaborations, which he’s generally game for.
A somber, sage book about art-making that deserves a readership beyond Cave’s fan base.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60737-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
