An ambitious but ultimately unsatisfying set of loosely interconnected tales, each of which require further embellishment to...
Lamb (Do as I Say and Not as I Do, 2013, etc.) charts rifts and bonds in American families across four centuries in this novella.
The five stories presented here tell of the Collings, Flournoy, Landis, and Atkins families, beginning in the early 1800s and ending in the early 2100s. Each story is linked to the previous one by blood ties (all laid out in a family tree at the beginning of the novella). The opening tale introduces John Collings, a 13-year-old boy whose father, Richard, is away fighting the British. It becomes his responsibility to take care of the livestock on his parents’ farm, yet as he struggles to fit the mold of manhood, his relationship with his mother deteriorates. The young boy’s rapid coming-of-age in the wilderness is engaging and psychologically detailed, yet the story is disappointingly cut short with an open-ended conclusion. This is the novella’s standout tale, however, and it showcases the author’s skill as a master of suspense; the accelerated breath of fear is almost audible in Lamb’s writing: “As the sounds came closer they did not resemble any animal he recognized. Within seconds a man passed through the dense undergrowth about twenty feet to the left of John, paused for a moment, and then fell forward on a cluster of elderberry plants as heavily as a drunk collapsing onto his bed.” Other stories recount a shotgun wedding, a family’s relationship with an African-American servant, and the complex and fraught relationship among a father, his son, and his Native American foster child. Each story shows that the author possesses the necessary tools to engage and hold his audience, but he also struggles to conclude his narratives. As a result, four stories here seem more like promising beginnings to tales that are yet untold. The fifth, set at the beginning of the 22nd century, approaches the concept of memory augmentation and tells of a mother receiving treatment to erase painful recollections of her dead son. It’s a short, abstract, and undeveloped vignette tacked on seemingly as an afterthought in order to stretch out the narrative timeline.
An ambitious but ultimately unsatisfying set of loosely interconnected tales, each of which require further embellishment to make them feel whole.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5350-2613-0
Page Count: 118
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An intriguing approach to identifying and relating to one’s emotions.
An analysis of our emotions and the skills required to understand them.
We all have emotions, but how many of us have the vocabulary to accurately describe our experiences or to understand how our emotions affect the way we act? In this guide to help readers with their emotions, Brackett, the founding director of Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, presents a five-step method he calls R.U.L.E.R.: We need to recognize our emotions, understand what has caused them, be able to label them with precise terms and descriptions, know how to safely and effectively express them, and be able to regulate them in productive ways. The author walks readers through each step and provides an intriguing tool to use to help identify a specific emotion. Brackett introduces a four-square grid called a Mood Meter, which allows one to define where an emotion falls based on pleasantness and energy. He also uses four colors for each quadrant: yellow for high pleasantness and high energy, red for low pleasantness and high energy, green for high pleasantness and low energy, and blue for low pleasantness and low energy. The idea is to identify where an emotion lies in this grid in order to put the R.U.L.E.R. method to good use. The author’s research is wide-ranging, and his interweaving of his personal story with the data helps make the book less academic and more accessible to general readers. It’s particularly useful for parents and teachers who want to help children learn to handle difficult emotions so that they can thrive rather than be overwhelmed by them. The author’s system will also find use in the workplace. “Emotions are the most powerful force inside the workplace—as they are in every human endeavor,” writes Brackett. “They influence everything from leadership effectiveness to building and maintaining complex relationships, from innovation to customer relations.”
An intriguing approach to identifying and relating to one’s emotions.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-21284-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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