An unflinching portrait of one family’s struggles and a mother’s boundaries that should appeal to memoir lovers.
A mother strengthens her faith over a lifetime of heartache in this spiritual account of recovery and acceptance.
When the debut author’s 28-year-old daughter, Nicole, went into early labor, Marshall was scared. She had a lifetime of experience as a mother to reflect on, having raised her son, Doug, and Nicole through turbulent years. In her own childhood, Marshall felt less than loved. As a young woman and teacher, she met Buddy and ignored the red flags of their relationship and married him. She soon was raising two children, one with unique challenges—Doug struggled at school, where he was sometimes abused and often misunderstood. While coping with Doug’s special needs, Marshall attended a seminary as a student. There she would find the community and faith that would lead her on her path. It’s this group that buoyed her when Nicole revealed a secret about Doug that rocked Marshall’s family to its core. Before long, teenage Doug was in jail; Marshall was asking for a divorce; and Nicole was facing her own struggles. Marshall relied on faith and her tools of recovery and was able to help Nicole when she became pregnant. Their mother-daughter relationship was tested—and strengthened—in the grief that was still to come their way. It takes a while for this account (which includes some photos) to set the stage, bouncing from childhood memory to young adulthood and back again in the first few chapters. The narrator truly finds her voice when sharing the home she found in the seminary: “I had not anticipated learning to walk a little taller in the world as a result.” The seriousness of Doug’s crime and the heartbreaking position that the narrator is put in are compelling in their brutal honesty and in the devastation that follows. It’s unique to read a memoir of addiction and trauma from the perspective of a parent in recovery, and there are a few moments when ideas of faith or healing threaten to overwhelm the story. But the epiphany that comes from the birth of Nicole’s baby—and the sorrow that follows—is earned by the book’s end.
An unflinching portrait of one family’s struggles and a mother’s boundaries that should appeal to memoir lovers.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-974442-62-1
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Emergings Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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