Tender and funny, this appealing modern love story is greatly enhanced by the author's drawings.
Following in the tradition of James Thurber and Jules Feiffer, best-selling author/illustrator Becker (Kids Make It Better: A Write-in, Draw-in Journal, 2010, etc.) combines droll illustrations with a lively narrative style in this chronicle of the high expectations and shattering disappointments on her journey to motherhood.
At age 25, the author discovered a love for cross-country biking and began her first lesbian love affair. Twenty-two years later, when her latest relationship ended on the issue of whether or not to become parents, the author decided to go it alone as a single mother. She began exploring whether two close gay male friends might consider being sperm donors. Becker describes her state of mind at the time: “I wished I was a Southern gastric brooding frog. No gastric brooding frog husband to find. No career to worry my shiny gray head. Life could be as simple as swallowing a batch of fertilized eggs and burping up some babies.” Her laugh-out-loud humor permeates this account of her experiences, from finding a sperm donor to dealing with medial professionals, insurance companies and the side effects of fertility treatments. Much of the tale involves the man who ultimately became her daughter's biological father and their relationship, which would go beyond physical fatherhood to include his active if infrequent involvement with his daughter. The process was halted when she suffered epileptic seizures and needed brain surgery, an experience Becker explored in her memoir, I Had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse? (2003). A longtime female friend who had raised her own son as a single mother offered encouragement and practical help. During this time, their relationship deepened, leading to a same-sex marriage with two mothers, in what was to become a three-parent family.
Tender and funny, this appealing modern love story is greatly enhanced by the author's drawings.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60819-276-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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