A moving story of a daughter seeking to understand her mother’s choices.
A memoir of immigration, divorce, and gender roles in modern Greece.
Kouidou-Giles, a Greek immigrant to the United States and child welfare professional, tells her story as a daughter trying to uncover certain truths about her past in 2015—and finding out much more than she expected. The book is dedicated to the author’s mother, Eleni; in the book, she’s called Nitsa, and is shown as rebelling against her society’s expectations of a good wife in order to save herself. The story is told mainly in flashbacks, partially interspersed with chronicles of flights between Athens and Seattle as the author read through decades-old court records of her parents’ divorce. The narrative begins in earnest with the author’s effort to find her mother’s grave in Thessaloniki, Greece, and becomes much deeper; it’s primarily a story of family dysfunction, divorce, and seeming abandonment in patriarchal mid-20th-century Greece. The author is meticulous in describing the social context of a time and place where no-fault divorce didn’t exist, and couples were required to stay together for 10 years before divorce proceedings could even begin. The result is a painfully honest portrayal of how the system could bring needless ugliness to divorce proceedings that left lasting pain and confusion for children caught in the middle. Kouidou-Giles also critiques past gender expectations, while making all the women in the story, including Nitsa’s mother-in-law, YiaYia (Grandma) Sophia, feel real. The book additionally offers a rich presentation of the cultural and legal background of this story of a Greek family, highlighting the contrast between ideals and expectations and messy reality; in particular, the author found that things weren’t what they seemed in the marital breakup. Although the narrative is somewhat slow at first, readers, like the author, eventually come to a greater understanding of all the people involved.
A moving story of a daughter seeking to understand her mother’s choices.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64742-171-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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