A mother describes her son’s descent into drugs, crime, and prison.
In this debut book, the author tells readers that the story is true, but the names of people and some places have been changed to protect the privacy of the involved parties. Grodzinsky employs a narrator, named Julie Jamison, who recounts her soul-deadening experiences with her son. Adopted at 6 weeks old, Michael acts up in school after Julie and her husband divorce. She remarries, but Michael fights with his stepbrothers, drinks, indulges in drugs, and steals. As a teen, he’s shot and hospitalized. He later pulls a knife on his stepfather, ends up in juvenile hall, and receives a diagnosis of “conduct disorder.” Skinheads become his new family, although he also impregnates and marries a couple of women, who hastily leave with their babies. Busted for dealing drugs in California, Michael’s sentenced to rehab and arrested again, this time in Las Vegas, for check forging. He lands in prison, enduring hardships and joining the Aryan Warriors for protection, while his mother deals with the petty rules the guards impose on visitors, who feel like inmates. After he’s paroled, Michael lands a job and buys a house. But he’s busted again for criminal activities with the Warriors, sentenced to 12-plus years in prison, and moved around the country, making family visits difficult. As her son turns 40, Julie learns of a great-granddaughter she never knew about. Although many of the ugly facts of prison life should be familiar to readers, this book provides a stirring personal account of the frustrations of dealing with a disturbed son and a system where recidivism rates run 70 to 80 percent. It’s impossible to say whether nature or nurture lies at the root of Michael’s troubles, but the author points out that privatization of prisons is a major cause of the facilities’ failures. Grodzinsky doesn’t delve into these issues too deeply. What comes through clearly is her narrator’s love, guilt, frustration, and hopelessness in the face of her son’s intractable problems and a corrupt, sick network unable to assist him. As the author notes, it makes no sense to house a man in prison for $15,000 to $60,000 a year and then spend “almost nothing” to help him adapt and survive upon release.
A tragic and moving story of a dysfunctional son and society’s inability to offer aid.
Pub Date: May 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5116-8214-5
Page Count: 158
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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