At times funny and touching, Clancy’s recollections from her childhood are otherwise all too familiar in their mundanity.
A sentimental journey through the author’s childhood.
Recollections of childhood are often gauzy half-remembrances that yield to selective memory. However, many authors are able to remain objective in their search through the past. In her debut book, writer and performer Clancy provides an impartial account of her life growing up in the outer reaches of Queens, but by stringing together a series of vignettes and remembrances rather than a thematically driven narrative, the recollections read more like an extended monologue. Growing up in an apartment with her mother in Bellerose, Queens, Clancy spent every other weekend at her police officer father’s cramped Broad Channel home and other weekends at the Hamptons estate of her mother’s boyfriend. Unfortunately, the novelty of these juxtapositions is short-lived. Skipping around in years, the author tells the story of her parents, the peculiarities of her grandparents, and the questionable decisions of her adolescence, which included smoking cigarettes and marijuana and regularly drinking while at school. In addition to her tales of adolescence, Clancy broaches the subject of her burgeoning homosexuality, chronicling a trip she and her mother took to visit her mother’s lesbian friend in Los Angeles. It was not until she was 19 that Clancy had her first girlfriend and came out to her parents. (Mom was fine. Dad, reluctantly accepted: “Ah, screw it. At least now we have two things in common—whiskey and women!”) Though Clancy’s story will strike a nerve with a particular strand of Gen Y who experienced the rap and grunge waves as high schoolers in the 1990s, there is not enough charm in the narrative to overcome the lack of focus and cohesion throughout her reflections.
At times funny and touching, Clancy’s recollections from her childhood are otherwise all too familiar in their mundanity.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90311-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
PROFILES
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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