Vivid stories of anguish and survival that are sometimes obscured by genealogical minutiae.
A Métis clan weathers bitter cold, ethnic bias, and sexual molestation in Canada’s Northwest Territories in this memoir.
Hardy, whose father was a White Canadian and mother was a Métis of mixed European and Shúhta Got’ıne First Nation ancestry, looks back to the 1850s in tracing his family’s history in Fort Norman and other subarctic villages. The author chronicles several generations of forebears: the women bearing heroic numbers of children and the men working as fur traders, clerks, and managers for the Hudson Bay Company. He moves on to his boyhood in Fort Norman, where he traveled by dog sled and absorbed the Métis cultural stew: Families still trapped and hunted but embraced Christianity and prized formal education. The book’s centerpiece is Hardy’s adolescent experience at a Roman Catholic boarding school, where he lived in a dormitory whose supervisor repeatedly raped him and other boys. (He includes a blistering indictment of the church for covering up such crimes.) Later chapters describe his career as a lawyer and Métis rights advocate and plumb the damage wrought by the molestation ordeal, which manifested in his alcoholism and failed marriage. Much of Hardy’s labyrinthine account consists of dry genealogical information that will be of interest mainly to family members. But there are also intriguing snippets of frontier history and lore: an episode of famine and cannibalism; his grandfather’s killing of a moose with a knife; and tales of the monstrous “Náhgáneh” bushman. The author also paints a revealing picture of social tensions, exploring how the Métis uneasily navigated White bigotry and Indigenous resentment and the antagonisms between Catholics and Anglicans. (Before his wedding, Hardy’s Catholic Métis grandfather had to sign a contract guaranteeing that he would let his wife and children practice Anglicanism.) Hardy’s prose, usually lucid and workmanlike, is searing in conveying his victimization at school—“It was about thirty years until I started losing the rotten smell of his body, which was ground into my senses”—and lyrical in evoking nature. (“There would be” the northern lights, “swirling like paintbrushes, spreading colour across the skies, which were filled with bright stars that glittered like diamonds.”) Beneath the reams of family factoids, readers will get an authentic and sometimes harrowing view of life in the Northwest Territories.
Vivid stories of anguish and survival that are sometimes obscured by genealogical minutiae.Pub Date: April 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-03-912667-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
