A short memoir that makes for pleasant reading but doesn’t quite strike a balance between snark and Christian optimism.
Lloyd (These Boots Are Made for Butt-Kickin’, 2015, etc.) tells how a tragedy kindled a deeper trust in God.
The author’s first son, Caswell, was stillborn, but she still had to endure a long, difficult labor—including an epidural and having her water manually broken. “This is stupid,” she says, in the jolting opening of this book. “This is stinkin’ 2012 and they haven’t figured out a way to get my dead baby out of my body without making me come to the labor and delivery ward.” Lloyd repeatedly cycles back to the circumstances of the delivery in between memories of her Oklahoma upbringing and of her husband, a fellow attorney, whom she met in Geneva, Switzerland. Her sarcastic, slang-filled Southern drawl pervades the first third of the text, with Lloyd announcing to “future pregnant friends,” “Don’t expect me to come to your baby showers” and labeling herself a “card-carrying member of the suck-it-up club.” The title chapter, however, shifts in tone to note how frequently the Bible mentions joy, and it feels sudden and forced. “Sure, I hearted Jesus,” Lloyd recalls, but Caswell’s stillbirth provoked a make-or-break situation: to survive, she realized that she had to develop a solid faith. Although she later became a mother of two, she learned that stillbirth and miscarriage were surprisingly common in her circle. Indeed, the primary worth of this memoir may be in reassuring readers with similar stories that they’re not alone and that transparency is the best policy: “those children exist. And they need to be acknowledged,” she says at one point. At another, she says, “People can deal. Or not.” Overall, the one- to five-page chapters sometimes resemble blog entries rather than a polished book, and a note of false cheer lingers throughout that detracts somewhat from the tragedy that prompted the writing. However, the chatty, between-girlfriends style (including such phrases as “Oh no she di-int,” “cray-cray,” and multiple hashtags) will appeal to fans of popular Christian writers such as Jen Hatmaker and Patsy Clairmont.
A short memoir that makes for pleasant reading but doesn’t quite strike a balance between snark and Christian optimism.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 153
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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