Ribon’s numerous fans should welcome this retelling of “things she shouldn’t share in public,” now twined with her adult...
Blogger, TV writer, “retired derby girl [and] Wonder Killer” Ribon (You Take It from Here, 2013, etc.) provides a contemporary perspective on her younger self’s most intimate teenage longings.
During her adolescent years, the author kept copies of the letters and notes she wrote to the various boys targeted for her affections. Along with her journal entries, those letters—to Thirty-Six Hours Boy, Silent Skateboarder Boy, Homeroom Boy, Nice Boy and Super Mario Brothers Boy—comprise much of the narrative thread, with chapter titles including “I Turned Sixteen and Got Really Horny on April 15th,” “Dear Dorkhouse Forum” and “My Year of Dicks.” Ribon explains her reasoning for retaining these embarrassing missives: “While most of you would probably not find it wise to publish your teenage diaries, it is an effective way to get people off your ass for saving all your shit, along with the bonus of a possible tax deduction once you reach Hoarding Level 3, also know as ‘I’d better rent a storage unit before I end up with a divorce.’ ” If reading through the detritus of Ribon’s adolescent longings is not tiresome enough, the author includes, in bold type, contemporary dissections of her previous copious correspondence and overwrought interior landscape. “The real tragedy is that nobody ever pulled me aside to gently inform me that some feelings I should keep inside, that not everybody deserves my truth,” she writes. “Or at least so much of my truth.” Many readers may agree with that sentiment.
Ribon’s numerous fans should welcome this retelling of “things she shouldn’t share in public,” now twined with her adult musings. For others, it’s a tedious slog through a year in the life of a teenager who, as the author herself recalled, wrote obsessively, compulsively and constantly.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-940207-05-6
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
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
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
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