by Sherlene Adolphe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 10, 2013
A compassionate guide that can help parents and kids with tough questions.
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A debut book steers young readers and their families through experiences of loss.
Twin stories in rhyming verses gently treat the death of a pet dog and parental divorce. The language is simple, often lilting, and should be attractive to grade school readers. Adolphe’s list of definitions at the back of each tale welcomes children to the pleasures of learning more words. Some entries seem a bit surprising, such as “Die/Died,” given the obvious subject matter of the volume, but others are both charming and important: “Embrace” (“to put arms around someone”), “Grief,” “Love,” “Embarrassed,” and “Ashamed.” The list encourages readers to accept the truth of their feelings. “Skipper Can No Longer Play” tells the story of a beloved dog who ages, still eager to see his boy, Oscar J, but is slowing down in his activities and agility. One day when Oscar comes home from school, Skip is gone. Mom explains that this disappearance is difficult but necessary: “Just as each year green leaves age, / Turn brown and fall dead from a tree, / All that is now living one day will die.” At first, Oscar thinks it must be his fault, for not minding his mother or not eating his vegetables, but she reassures him that something more mysterious is at work, and that Skip can be held in the memory. “Memory” and “Imagination” would have been useful terms for the definitions list, as they name the abstract concepts the book works hard to illustrate through narrative and dialogue. Oscar’s resourceful mother tells him to picture Skip frolicking and running, even misbehaving. As the mental images add up, some with humorous memories attached, the pain lessens. “Daddy Can No Longer Stay” likewise reaches for a comforting, positive outcome; Oscar is still not to blame, and he can look forward to seeing his father often, just in a different house. “So,” asks Oscar, “does this mean you both still love me and want me as your son?” His dad answers that they were the “proudest parents on earth!” the very day he was born.
A compassionate guide that can help parents and kids with tough questions.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4918-7992-4
Page Count: 54
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Helen Fremont ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 11, 2020
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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by Laura Schroff and Alex Tresniowski ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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by Laura Schroff & Alex Tresniowski ; illustrated by Barry Root
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