Vivid recollections from a difficult childhood.
A debut memoir, told from a child’s perspective, that focuses on life at a small-town bar.
Boggess (née Cherny) and her family lived above Reid’s Hotel & Bar in the industrial town of Rosendale, New York, in the early 1950s. Her parents both worked in the bar, where she often did her elementary school homework before going up to bed. But they didn’t just serve alcohol, the author says; they also imbibed it, which fueled increasingly bitter fights between them. Boggess loved animals, movies, and playing with neighbors “Porky” and Bobby Ann Rosenkranse. She also kept her eyes and ears open, resulting in vibrant descriptions in this memoir—of her mother putting on a girdle, for example, or her father managing to get free vacuum cleaners from salesmen. Holidays help to mark the passage of time in memorable Thanksgiving and Christmas scenes. The dialogue and inner monologues of the author, complete with period slang and cursing, are first-rate, giving every character’s personality its own flavor. For instance, Boggess effectively captures her own 7-year-old reluctance to attend mass on Easter: “Oh, no. Here goes Father Mulry with the freakin’ frankincense.” The carefree innocence of these early childhood reminiscences changes, however, when the author reveals that she was repeatedly sexually abused by an unnamed bar patron, who would enter her unlocked apartment, where she was alone, at night. The trauma caused her to lose sleep and struggle at school, she says; then, one night, the man came into the apartment when Bobby Ann was sleeping over. Bobby Ann informed her own mother of the terrible incident; the author’s father then made sure that the apartment was locked at night, which put a stop to the assaults—though not to the traumatic memories. Although the book is overlong, the ending, in 1955, still feels sudden, and an epilogue gives minimal detail about the author’s later life. The author also occasionally jarringly switches between past and present tense. However, the use of a child’s point of view is convincing, and the quantity—and quality—of the memories here are impressive.
Vivid recollections from a difficult childhood.Pub Date: May 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944037-67-3
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Epigraph Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 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
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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