A brutally honest light shone on dark depths.
A memoir soaked in divorce, alcoholism, failed suicide attempts, but also hope.
Growing up in North Dakota, Minnesota and Portland, Ore., the author is the second of five children. Shy and sensitive, she cowers in school, terrified of drawing attention to herself. She’s ashamed of her family’s grinding poverty and fearful of her abusive, alcoholic father. Contrasted with this grim existence are Loehr’s wonderfully rendered reminisces of weeklong summer visits to her grandparents, where she picks raspberries, buys penny candy and plays dress up with “Grandma’s old dresses and hats and purses and high heels.” But life at home grows more chaotic when her father abandons the family for another woman and refuses to pay child support. While her mother works, attempting to support a family of six, the author, then 14, and her sister sneak out and get drunk. At 18, Loehr gets pregnant, fails at attempts to abort her own baby and resigns to marry Dane, the baby’s father. The next few years include having two more children and trying to keep a shaky marriage together with her abusive, alcoholic husband while riding a financial roller coaster of great success followed by crashing bankruptcy. Loehr drinks heavily and grows increasingly unhappy. Dane leaves her, and she finds herself incapacitated, lost in a maelstrom of wrenching depression, exhaustion and even a hospital stay with a team of doctors trying to cure her. At rock bottom, she concocts a list of ways to commit suicide: She tries to overdose on pills but is rushed to the hospital; next, she tries to electrocute herself but fails. The third attempt, with a gun, leaves her severely maimed. But at this point, she gains the will to live. From there, it’s a gutsy walk down an agonizing road marked by physical recovery and, through AA, a spiritual recovery. What follows is well-described personal success, years of sobriety, a true sense of self, and finally, deservedly, the ability to reflect upon and marvel at her accomplishments. The narrative flows smoothly, but there are times when complicated situations seem to beg for more sophisticated writing. However, much of the book’s appeal lies in its simplicity, and many of its stronger moments are those captured with clear, simple sensory details: “The memory scent of color crayons and old hymnals washes over me,” she writes. Her total, awful desperation is captured here, alive but fortunately caged in the past.
A brutally honest light shone on dark depths.Pub Date: June 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475227598
Page Count: 150
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2013
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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