An emotionally fraught tale of a mother’s love and her actions to save her daughter from opioid addiction.
Another heartbreaking tale of opioid abuse and the toll it takes on an entire family.
Missing money, bent and burned or missing spoons, and missing jewelry: All of these served as clues that eventually led Cavanagh to the realization that her daughter, Katie, was a heroin addict who had stolen from her in order to buy drugs. The author’s grief and suffering are consistently palpable as she traces the numerous paths she took with her ex-husband, Mike, over the course of several years, to get Katie into treatment centers. She shares the anguish and dismay she felt each time her daughter slipped away again, returning to her life of drug abuse and abusive boyfriends. “I’ve seen so much pain in the last few years,” she writes. “I hadn’t known just how much pain the world could contain. It crushes me sometimes, not just my own but the pain of so many others also trying to hang on to whatever shred of their loved ones they can. I don’t know how I got here. There is never a day that goes by that this does not feel very surreal.” Cavanagh describes her powerful feelings of both fear and shame and how her need for support led her to reach out to others experiencing the same trauma. Because of her deep involvement in this crisis and her discovery that help was limited, the author founded a nonprofit group, Magnolia New Beginnings, to aid parents and drug users in finding treatment and the necessary emotional support for those struggling with all kinds of substance abuse. While Cavanagh’s story is unique, it’s also, sadly, fairly common. When she discovered the shockingly widespread nature of the problem, the author devoted herself to addressing the crisis—and its attendant stigmas—head-on.
An emotionally fraught tale of a mother’s love and her actions to save her daughter from opioid addiction.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-29734-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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