An imperfectly told but galvanizing portrait of the devastating impact of mental illness on those it afflicts and those...
Debut memoir chronicles three girls’ escape into a fantasy world as their mother’s schizophrenia grows worse.
In 1970s San Francisco, life for the author and sisters Sara and Amy became as tumultuous as the cultural firestorm engulfing the nation. With the Vietnam War raging on television, their left-leaning parents struggled to fit into a new, upper-class lifestyle in their apartment overlooking the bay. Reconstructing the familial tensions she witnessed as a child, Flynn shows her beautiful, intelligent mother slowly succumbing to a mental illness that led her to believe she played a pivotal role in the battle between good and evil. Flynn’s father, the frequent target of these paranoid delusions, moved out and sued for custody of his daughters. Judicial prejudice kept the girls with their mother. The author’s dramatic memories of her mother’s fits of violent rage and prolonged periods of neglect are vivid and artful. Depictions of neighborhood bullies, a filthy home with broken windows, confrontations with civil servants and random acts of child abuse propel the reader through the narrative. As the sisters seek sanctuary in a world of intensified play, the pace accelerates toward a shocking, sad climax. Flynn can be forgiven the abundance of metaphors linking water and emotion—two elements, we are heavy-handedly reminded, that share the properties of enormity, violence and mystery—as the tragedy’s raison d’être comes into view. Readers will be less forgiving with a historical background evoked largely in stilted, tedious clichés.
An imperfectly told but galvanizing portrait of the devastating impact of mental illness on those it afflicts and those around them.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58243-385-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 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.
