A beguiling tale of a child bewitched by the best magic: stories told by an adult not too old for make-believe.
An affectionate appreciation of a friendship that enriched a life and stirred an imagination.
Canadian actress Coyne subtly reminds us that individuals can change lives in ways that resonate forever. She begins by describing a photograph taken in June 1963 at a Toronto train station. Five-year old Susan, her mother, and older sister Nancy were about to board the transcontinental train bound for Lake Superior. The family owned a summer home on an island in a nearby lake, and Coyne vividly describes their excitement at sighting the island, opening up the house, and revisiting their favorite haunts, as well as their neighbors, the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Moir. That particular summer, Susan discovered an abandoned fireplace in the hedge between the two houses. When her father told her it was built by elves, she began leaving small presents there that disappeared by morning. One day she found a letter (her nanny read it to her) written by “Princess Nootsie Tah” on behalf of Queen Mab. Coyne dictated a reply, and the correspondence began. Reproduced here, the letters are a charming mix of fairy lore, quotes, and pithy comments from the Princess—an alter ego, we slowly realize, for Mr. Moir, a retired school inspector. Susan spent hours with him, helping in his garden or listening to him read about fairies. Young enough to believe, she was captivated by the letters and the stories. By the following summer, the fairy letters had stopped, but Susan continued her friendship and correspondence with Mr. Moir until his death years later. His letters are rich in literary allusions, information, and encouragement, which Coyne especially appreciates when she realizes in high school that she would rather act than write. Fittingly, her first role after graduation was in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
A beguiling tale of a child bewitched by the best magic: stories told by an adult not too old for make-believe.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31706-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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
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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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