An articulate, painful, and touching journey that ends with an against-the-odds victory.
In this debut memoir, a woman shares the traumas and triumphs of her seven years in and out of the foster-care system in upstate New York during the 1950s.
DuMond was 11 years old when the police took her mother away in an ambulance and the author was placed in the Susquehanna Valley Children’s Home in Binghamton. Her father had deserted the family years earlier, and her single mother was an alcoholic who had violent episodes. Six months later, DuMond was informed by the housemother Miss Hartford that her mother had been released from the hospital and that she and the author’s stepfather were coming for a visit. “My stepfather?” DuMond thinks. “I don’t have a stepfather.” Evidently, after her mother left the hospital, she married neighbor Les Whalen. They rented a duplex outside Binghamton and wanted the author to live with them. The experiment lasted less than six months, when her mother began drinking again. DuMond’s return to the children’s home coincided with the institution’s opening of smaller houses, each one serving as a residence for 12 girls and one housemother. The accommodations were significantly better than dormitory life, but the Cottage 3 housemother was especially antagonistic toward the author. Well-honed, primarily present-tense prose lends an air of immediacy to the memoir: “On most nights…I lie in bed and wait. In the dark, it feels like something is going to happen. I don’t know what, but it scares me.” Many of the stories illustrate harsh treatment, as when the Cottage 3 housemother forced DuMond into a tiny utility closet with scalding hot water running. But the tone is lightened with warm vignettes featuring Mr. McPherson, director of the home, and Miss Maude, the new housemother for Cottage 3. They provide supportive direction, appreciation of the author’s academic achievements, and genuine affection. Her tales about a stint working as a 16-year-old apprentice in local summer stock, including delightfully humorous backstage gossip about several of the decade’s theatrical luminaries, add some welcome levity.
An articulate, painful, and touching journey that ends with an against-the-odds victory.Pub Date: May 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5439-4078-7
Page Count: 276
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Mostly conservative in its stance and choices but common-sensical and current.
Savvy counsel and starter lists for fretting parents.
New York Times Book Review editor Paul (My Life With Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues, 2017, etc.) and Russo, the children’s book editor for that publication, provide standard-issue but deftly noninvasive strategies for making books and reading integral elements in children’s lives. Some of it is easier said than done, but all is intended to promote “the natural, timeless, time-stopping joys of reading” for pleasure. Mediumwise, print reigns supreme, with mild approval for audio and video books but discouraging words about reading apps and the hazards of children becoming “slaves to the screen.” In a series of chapters keyed to stages of childhood, infancy to the teen years, the authors supplement their advice with short lists of developmentally appropriate titles—by their lights, anyway: Ellen Raskin’s Westing Game on a list for teens?—all kitted out with enticing annotations. The authors enlarge their offerings with thematic lists, from “Books That Made Us Laugh” to “Historical Fiction.” In each set, the authors go for a mix of recent and perennially popular favorites, leaving off mention of publication dates so that hoary classics like Janice May Udry’s A Tree Is Nice seem as fresh as David Wiesner’s Flotsam and Carson Ellis’ Du Iz Tak? and sidestepping controversial titles and themes in the sections for younger and middle-grade readers—with a few exceptions, such as a cautionary note that some grown-ups see “relentless overparenting” in Margaret Wise Brown’s Runaway Bunny. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series doesn’t make the cut except for a passing reference to its “troubling treatment of Indians.” The teen lists tend to be edgier, salted with the provocative likes of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give, and a nod to current demands for more LGBTQ and other #ownvoices books casts at least a glance beyond the mainstream. Yaccarino leads a quartet of illustrators who supplement the occasional book cover thumbnails with vignettes and larger views of children happily absorbed in reading.
Mostly conservative in its stance and choices but common-sensical and current.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5235-0530-2
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Workman
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Despite Meyer's unusual perspective, this journal contains memorable passages of joy and sorrow for parents and children of...
A 70-something reflects on becoming the father of his sixth child at age 59.
Meyer fathered three sons during the Vietnam War era while married to his first wife. A journalism professor at California State University-Long Beach, he entered a second marriage to a student 27 years his junior, fathering two daughters and a son. After much agonizing about balancing career and family, Meyer took early retirement from his teaching to become a parent and a home-based freelance writer. Before his retirement, the first batch of his diary-like entries became a book, 1989's My Summer With Molly: The Journal of a Second Generation Father. After retirement, he became a regular journal-writer, musing about parenting and dozens of related threads. Just as Molly dominated the first collection of entries, son Franz dominates the second collection. At turns doctrinaire, old fuddy-duddy, self-deprecating, melancholy, humorous, even hip, Meyer is a thoughtful guide through daily life. The seemingly oblique title becomes clear in the context of the W.B. Yeats' quotation from which it is derived: "An aged man is but a paltry thing / A tattered coat upon a stick unless / Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress..." Meyer sounds ageist at times, but throughout, he is determined to fight his own aging and to serve as a good husband and father. Eschewing sentimentality much of the time, Meyer can't help occasionally lapsing into teary-eyed territory. He concludes that "geezer fatherdom" is worth the costs, that "in the end, there is only love, active and remembered, to warm the chill of a cooling universe."
Despite Meyer's unusual perspective, this journal contains memorable passages of joy and sorrow for parents and children of all ages.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-942273-05-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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