A Christian remembrance with engaging family dynamics and an unusual voice.
A debut memoir follows a transformation from addiction to acceptance and faith.
Brannen writes that she always had a difficult relationship with her mother, but five weeks after her mother’s death, she felt moved to commit their stories to the page. She tells of the religious process behind her book, including casual conversations with God, as well as the intriguing tale of her life. Born fourth in a family of eight girls, Brannen had a tough childhood, she says, including early sexual abuse by an unnamed, local “twenty-something.” This produced a tough young girl who would beat up other kids who made fun of one of her sisters. Meanwhile, her mother sowed discontent between her daughters; Brannen also notes that “There are very few memories of my mother that don’t involve men—men who were not my father.” She explores the idea that both she and her mother shared a pattern of sex and addiction as adults. For Brannen, that meant a post-high-school life of “Drug busts, drug deals gone bad, DWIs, lost jobs, wrecked cars, evictions, convictions, barroom brawls, and so much more.” She eventually settled down and had two sons, both of whom were diagnosed with bipolar disorder. But it was the experience of seeing her mother die from ALS, she says, that finally pushed her to write this book and embrace God’s plans for her life. Brannen offers some very compelling material as she looks back on her and her sisters’ childhoods, finally understanding the adult problems that ripped through their lives. She counterbalances these dark subjects with a positive style and quirky perspective, often chatting directly with God and injecting humor into the narrative where she can. At times, however, things can feel too lighthearted; for example, believing a bird is your mother’s spirit stretches the limits of what many religious readers would consider “miraculous,” but Brannen maintains a positive, affirming voice throughout. For instance, when she thinks that acquaintances might consider her “crazy” for talking to birds, she says, “Maybe I was, but who cares? It made me happy, and that was what mattered.”
A Christian remembrance with engaging family dynamics and an unusual voice.Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-8111-6
Page Count: 144
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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