An insightful and moving account of survival and recovery.
A personal, candid, and powerful memoir about surviving trauma and living with disability.
Henman had a busy life as a singer, actor, concert and theater director, and mother of three teenagers, which was upended suddenly on a sunny summer day on June 9, 2013. She and her 19-year-old daughter, Maia, were driving home to Nelson, British Columbia, from a weekend visit with relatives in Calgary, Alberta, where Maia had just completed her first year of university, when a drunk driver crashed into them head-on. Both women suffered horrific injuries, multiple surgeries, long hospitalizations, PTSD, chronic pain, and disabilities that necessitated the use of wheelchairs. Over the next three years, they also contended with complicated, slow criminal and civil legal proceedings against the driver in a system that, as Henman depicts it, often makes victims feel powerless. The author tells her story in straightforward, matter-of-fact language and with great honesty, as when she tells of weeping tears of joy the first time she’s able to shower, and even some humor, as when she calls recurrent abscesses “little bastards.” She’s also thoughtful and empathetic about her struggles to come to terms with the crash and its consequences. The loss of music in her life is particularly poignant; she was unable to listen to it for the first year, due to brain injury, and damage to her vocal cords altered her voice. Her account of living with an ileostomy offers a new perspective on disability, and she argues persuasively that driving under the influence should be treated as a violent crime. The first two-thirds of the narrative focus mainly on her recovery process, highlighting the support of the author’s family and community, while the latter portion deals with legal aspects in more detail and the help she received from Mothers Against Drunk Driving Canada, for which she’s an active volunteer. An epilogue describes Henman’s eventual return to creative work, her ongoing advocacy for crime victims, and Maia’s graduation, budding career, and advocacy for people living with chronic pain.
An insightful and moving account of survival and recovery.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-77-386049-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Caitlin Press
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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