A reminder to look past a diagnosis and see a person in full.
A poignant account by a woman who learns life-affirming lessons from her autistic daughter.
Jannazzo’s straightforward, moving narrative chronicles how her daughter’s autism transformed the author’s life. The author does not attempt to be heroic; she confesses how life with her daughter was challenging: “I became frustrated. I shouted, ‘Diana, talk to me, sing to me, something, anything at all.’ ” Later, while in the process of making the decision to place Diana in an independent living situation, Jannazzo admits, “I decided to seek professional counseling in order to prepare myself for this major change in our lives and deal with the confusion and guilt I was feeling.” These admissions give necessary depth and pathos to the book. When the work details the support of Jannazzo’s family, however, it begins to sound like a thank-you letter: “Thank goodness for Uncle Louie. He owned a tow truck business and was out working many times in the evenings. As it would take me hours to get Diana to fall asleep some nights, Uncle Louie came to the rescue.” In contrast, Jannazzo’s compelling anecdotes about Diana prove to be the true source of inspiration. She tells how a staff member gave Diana roller skates to see if they could change her behavior after she got into trouble at school. The effect was immediate: “She began to enjoy school; she became the social butterfly as she skated from classroom to classroom to ‘visit’ her classmates, always looking for attention.” Jannazzo celebrates who her daughter is today, “She lives in her own wondrous world, never having learned to read or write, but she is Diana. I think she knows more about life and living and loving than most people I know.”
A reminder to look past a diagnosis and see a person in full.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1477146552
Page Count: 76
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.
An author’s trip to Venice takes a distinctly Borgesian turn.
In November 2020, soccer club Venizia F.C. offered Nigerian American author Madu a writing residency as part of its plan “to turn the team into a global entity of fashion, culture, and sports.” Flying to Venice for the fellowship, he felt guilty about leaving his immigrant parents, who were shocked to learn upon moving to the U.S. years earlier that their Nigerian teaching certifications were invalid, forcing his father to work as a stocking clerk at Rite Aid to support the family. Madu’s experiences in Venice are incidental to what is primarily a story about his family, especially his strained relationship with his father, who was disappointed with many of his son’s choices. Unfortunately, the author’s seeming disinterest in Venice renders much of the narrative colorless. He says the trip across the Ponte della Libertà bridge was “magical,” but nothing he describes—the “endless water on both sides,” the nearby seagulls—is particularly remarkable. Little in the text conveys a sense of place or the unique character of his surroundings. Madu is at his best when he focuses on family dynamics and his observations that, in the largely deserted city, “I was one of the few Black people around.” He cites Borges, giving special note to the author’s “The House of Asterion,” in which the minotaur “explains his situation as a creature and as a creature within the labyrinth” of multiple mirrors. This notion leads to the Borgesian turn in the book’s second half, when, in an extended sequence, Madu imagines himself transformed into a minotaur, with “the head of a bull” and his body “larger, thicker, powerful but also cumbersome.” It’s an engaging passage, although stylistically out of keeping with much of what has come before.
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781953368669
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.
The bestselling author recalls her childhood and her family’s wartime experiences.
Readers of Winspear’s popular Maisie Dobbs mystery series appreciate the London investigator’s canny resourcefulness and underlying humanity as she solves her many cases. Yet Dobbs had to overcome plenty of hardships in her ascent from her working-class roots. Part of the appeal of Winspear’s Dobbs series are the descriptions of London and the English countryside, featuring vividly drawn particulars that feel like they were written with firsthand knowledge of that era. In her first book of nonfiction, the author sheds light on the inspiration for Dobbs and her stories as she reflects on her upbringing during the 1950s and ’60s. She focuses much attention on her parents’ lives and their struggles supporting a family, as they chose to live far removed from their London pasts. “My parents left the bombsites and memories of wartime London for an openness they found in the country and on the land,” writes Winspear. As she recounts, each of her parents often had to work multiple jobs, which inspired the author’s own initiative, a trait she would apply to the Dobbs character. Her parents recalled grueling wartime experiences as well as stories of the severe battlefield injuries that left her grandfather shell-shocked. “My mother’s history,” she writes, “became my history—probably because I was young when she began telling me….Looking back, her stories—of war, of abuse at the hands of the people to whom she and her sisters had been billeted when evacuated from London, of seeing the dead following a bombing—were probably too graphic for a child. But I liked listening to them.” Winspear also draws distinctive portraits of postwar England, altogether different from the U.S., where she has since settled, and her unsettling struggles within the rigid British class system.
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64129-269-6
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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