While it could use a stronger structure, this book deftly explores a captivating spiritual journey.
A debut memoir chronicles a life spent nurturing special gifts.
Avery describes her childhood as one that was far from what most people would consider ideal. As she explains, “I was taken away from my mother and separated from my siblings at a young age due to my mother’s abuse, neglect, and inability to care for me and my siblings.” As a child, the author would find herself locked in a closet. Though her siblings would feel frightened in such a circumstance, Avery would think of the closet as a safe place. It was there that she would astral travel to faraway places, beginning to realize that she was different from other people. While the author would spend her early years with a series of foster families, she started honing esoteric communications during that time. Even though Avery’s future was usually uncertain, she could find comfort in the fact that she “had the abilities to see, hear and speak to spirits.” It was from such a background that the author would emerge as an adult with abilities like clairvoyance and a steadfast belief in “the energies of the universe.” Her convictions would at times lead her into conflicts with others, and it these recollections that are the most memorable. One standout scene involves a Wiccaning ceremony for the author’s newborn son, Danial. It was an event that made her husband’s family very nervous: “I don’t know if it was because they wanted to make sure that Danial was not being sacrificed to the Gods or something silly like that.” Whether one finds the idea of people dressed in black cloaks carrying a baby enlightening, terrifying, or comical, this episode vividly illustrates that dealing with diversity is hardly easy. Although the Wiccaning ceremony is clearly described, the challenges the author faced in sharing her gifts can at times become diluted in the text. She begins the book explaining her clashes with her in-laws, although, without the greater context of her life experiences, this information is not as striking as it might have been with a better chronological organization. The account conveys an overall positive message, but some chapters feel a bit jumbled.
While it could use a stronger structure, this book deftly explores a captivating spiritual journey.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-8748-4
Page Count: 155
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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