bookshelf

A Silk Purse from a Sow's Ear?

Name: A Silk Purse from a Sow's Ear?
Author: Stephanie Harrington
ISBN: 978-1-5320-0226-7

by Stephanie Harrington ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 27, 2016

A sometimes-rambling and melodramatic tale, but one that remains compelling.

bookshelf

Harrington’s debut novel revolves around the trials and tribulations of a girl abandoned by her birth parents and unloved by her adoptive mother—but who’s determined to make something of herself.

In 1952, sometime after Georgina Jackson’s second birthday, her parents separate. Her mother takes custody of Georgina’s brother, Ian, while Georgina stays with her father. The child would never see her mother or brother again, and, strangely, they aren’t even mentioned throughout her remaining saga. When she’s about 3, her father dresses her up and brings her to the Frazers, who are to be her foster parents while he goes off to find better job opportunities. After several months, they take Georgina’s father to court to terminate his parental rights, officially adopting the child. She gets bullied in school and struggles academically, but she finds her voice through music, excelling to the point where she’s awarded a scholarship to a music college. But when her adoptive father becomes ill, she must quit school and find a job. This ultimately ends her involvement in music, and eventually, she winds up working in some ill-defined aspect of the banking industry. Harrington shows how Georgina’s deep-seated feelings of self-doubt remain with her through adulthood, which leads to a series of poor marriage choices, resulting in the painful irony of history repeating itself when Georgina’s forced to relinquish two of her own children to foster care. The twists and turns of Harrington’s plot have all the elements of a soap opera, and it has a Dickensian element that will compel readers to continue forward. The author adopts a unique narrative position in this sweeping third-person tale, as she’s both a storyteller and a commentator on the action. For example, regarding Georgina’s childhood memory of sitting under a kitchen table, hearing the thumping of a rolling pin, she writes: “We can only assume it’s her mother, but poppet learned at an early age not to take anything for granted, so it could have been anyone.”

A sometimes-rambling and melodramatic tale, but one that remains compelling.

Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5320-0226-7

Page Count: 288

Publisher: iUniverse

Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

bookshelf

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)