The touching, unforgettable story of two brave girls fighting a deadly disease and the loving support of the women who gave...
Shared memoir of two mothers whose daughters are fighting cancer, by artist, writer, and self-help coach Lane (I Am the Wind, 2011) and Nersten, a home-schooling mom.
Two 12-year-old girls battled the same rare form of cancer, virtually simultaneously. Through the Internet—CarePages specifically—their mothers, Lane and Nersten, connected and eventually formed a deep bond, borne of shared experience. While Celeste in Toronto and Hayley in New Jersey dealt with surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, their mothers offered each other support and love via email, and the girls grew close via Skype. Despite the fact that the daughters and mothers shared an unusual diagnosis, similar treatment protocol, and strong faith, they are different in many ways. Lane is divorced from Celeste’s father, and her daughter had been living with her father two hours away. During Celeste’s treatment, Lane enjoyed the rare gift of spending hours on end with her daughter, as she and Celeste’s stepmother, Michelle, alternated days in the hospital. Knowing at the outset that one girl will survive—but not which one—makes the story more poignant. Though undeniably sad, the memoir is never maudlin, instead managing to inspire hope and admiration as a young girl chooses how she wishes to spend her final days. Conveyed via prose, email messages, and Facebook posts, the memoir reads quickly, seeming far shorter than its 200-plus pages. Although both women are deeply caring mothers who rely heavily on their faith, their different personalities emerge: Lane is the artist, seeking creative outlets for her feelings, while Nersten is a nurturer, spending her rare time away from Hayley with her other two children and constantly expressing concern for Lane’s custody situation. Although the authors intended their book for parents facing a child’s cancer diagnosis, the memoir serves as an inspirational story of hope for the general reader. Hayley and Celeste were heartbreakingly, unbelievably strong.
The touching, unforgettable story of two brave girls fighting a deadly disease and the loving support of the women who gave them life.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Ulukau Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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