A cautionary tale that could help readers minimize the trauma of a contentious divorce.
An autobiographical account of an ugly divorce and the insidious effects of parental alienation.
“Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Leo Tolstoy famously pointed out in his novel Anna Karenina. Joseph, once the proud patriarch of an unhappy family, would likely agree. Years ago, the author and his then-girlfriend Diane married and quickly started a family. Joseph writes that he was a good provider, but Diane grew restless, stepping out to local bars and plotting wild getaways with her girlfriends. Joseph objected to her lifestyle, her materialism and her social climbing, and they eventually separated. In an attempt to avoid further conflict, Joseph didn’t seek any legal help in negotiating their divorce agreement, which gave Diane primary custody of his daughters. It’s a decision that later haunted him, as he says that his ex-wife gradually drove a wedge between him and his children. He writes that she got a restraining order against him after a seemingly innocuous encounter, and later, she made false reports to the police. In the end, he says, Diane’s skillful manipulations destroyed his relationship with his children. This memoir is a sobering look at all that can go wrong when a marriage ends acrimoniously. Unfortunately, its tone is often one of anger. Although the author admits he’s made some mistakes, he writes that Diane is an “evil genius” who bears sole responsibility for the marriage’s collapse; he’s also writes of what he sees as “a master conspiracy” against him, in which Diane’s boyfriend, the local police and family-court judges are all players. However, the lessons of this story will be clear for anyone contemplating a divorce. Readers will appreciate the importance of retaining an attorney to make sure that divorce terms and custody arrangements are clear, and they will also get a clearer understanding of the signs of parental alienation.
A cautionary tale that could help readers minimize the trauma of a contentious divorce.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494845940
Page Count: 178
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.
An author’s trip to Venice takes a distinctly Borgesian turn.
In November 2020, soccer club Venizia F.C. offered Nigerian American author Madu a writing residency as part of its plan “to turn the team into a global entity of fashion, culture, and sports.” Flying to Venice for the fellowship, he felt guilty about leaving his immigrant parents, who were shocked to learn upon moving to the U.S. years earlier that their Nigerian teaching certifications were invalid, forcing his father to work as a stocking clerk at Rite Aid to support the family. Madu’s experiences in Venice are incidental to what is primarily a story about his family, especially his strained relationship with his father, who was disappointed with many of his son’s choices. Unfortunately, the author’s seeming disinterest in Venice renders much of the narrative colorless. He says the trip across the Ponte della Libertà bridge was “magical,” but nothing he describes—the “endless water on both sides,” the nearby seagulls—is particularly remarkable. Little in the text conveys a sense of place or the unique character of his surroundings. Madu is at his best when he focuses on family dynamics and his observations that, in the largely deserted city, “I was one of the few Black people around.” He cites Borges, giving special note to the author’s “The House of Asterion,” in which the minotaur “explains his situation as a creature and as a creature within the labyrinth” of multiple mirrors. This notion leads to the Borgesian turn in the book’s second half, when, in an extended sequence, Madu imagines himself transformed into a minotaur, with “the head of a bull” and his body “larger, thicker, powerful but also cumbersome.” It’s an engaging passage, although stylistically out of keeping with much of what has come before.
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781953368669
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.
The bestselling author recalls her childhood and her family’s wartime experiences.
Readers of Winspear’s popular Maisie Dobbs mystery series appreciate the London investigator’s canny resourcefulness and underlying humanity as she solves her many cases. Yet Dobbs had to overcome plenty of hardships in her ascent from her working-class roots. Part of the appeal of Winspear’s Dobbs series are the descriptions of London and the English countryside, featuring vividly drawn particulars that feel like they were written with firsthand knowledge of that era. In her first book of nonfiction, the author sheds light on the inspiration for Dobbs and her stories as she reflects on her upbringing during the 1950s and ’60s. She focuses much attention on her parents’ lives and their struggles supporting a family, as they chose to live far removed from their London pasts. “My parents left the bombsites and memories of wartime London for an openness they found in the country and on the land,” writes Winspear. As she recounts, each of her parents often had to work multiple jobs, which inspired the author’s own initiative, a trait she would apply to the Dobbs character. Her parents recalled grueling wartime experiences as well as stories of the severe battlefield injuries that left her grandfather shell-shocked. “My mother’s history,” she writes, “became my history—probably because I was young when she began telling me….Looking back, her stories—of war, of abuse at the hands of the people to whom she and her sisters had been billeted when evacuated from London, of seeing the dead following a bombing—were probably too graphic for a child. But I liked listening to them.” Winspear also draws distinctive portraits of postwar England, altogether different from the U.S., where she has since settled, and her unsettling struggles within the rigid British class system.
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64129-269-6
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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