A touching and absorbing remembrance of the lasting impact of a difficult upbringing.
In this memoir, a debut author grapples with lasting effects of childhood trauma in a 1960s-era suburb.
“Who really wrecked our home?” Reid rhetorically asks her deceased father in the book’s prologue, noting that despite that fact that he left her family nearly half a century ago, she still feels hurt by the divorce. Growing up in the early 1960s, the author’s family seemingly embodied the post–World War II American dream: They lived in an idyllic Chicago suburb; vacationed in Nantucket, Massachusetts; and spent weekends playing flag football. However, Reid writes that, even as a youngster, it was clear to her that her mother was troubled, as she made several mysterious visits to the hospital, espoused theories of aliens and UFOs, and believed that “her dead mother walked the earth.” Neighborhood kids, influenced by local gossip, mocked the author, repeating what they overhead from their parents: that her mother was “plain nuts.” As is later revealed in the book’s poignant narrative, Reid’s mentally ill mother was admitted to the hospital’s psychiatric ward on multiple occasions, where she received electroconvulsive therapy. The treatment not only changed her in fundamental ways (“the mother the ambulance brought back,” the author writes, “was not the same lady”), but also transformed her father. He coped with his wife’s illness by abusing alcohol and became increasingly hostile, verbally abusive, and dour, Reid says; eventually, he left and began a second family. This brutally honest and emotionally raw memoir is written as an extended letter from a daughter to her often estranged father. Reid effectively connects her personal story—and her journey toward forgiveness—to broader questions related to childhood feelings of abandonment, confusion, and self-blame. The author is a career educator with a master’s degree in writing and the teaching of writing from the University of Maine, and she’s a skilled storyteller who taps into her childhood self and contextualizes her story within the cultural milieu of ’60s-era suburban conformity, counterculture, and antiquated approaches to mental health.
A touching and absorbing remembrance of the lasting impact of a difficult upbringing.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781960090898
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing Company
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.
Remembering “Hershy.”
Three hundred and twenty-eight days. That’s how long Hersh Goldberg-Polin was held in captivity—tortured and starved by his captors in underground tunnels—before he was executed. He was 23 years old. In this unvarnished and heartrending account, Goldberg-Polin’s mother, Rachel, writes of the unending torment that she and her husband, Jon, endured after learning that their son had been kidnapped by Hamas terrorists during the attacks of October 7, 2023. Like so many other young people on that day, Hersh was attending a music festival in Israel—a celebration of love and unity. As Goldberg-Polin writes, her son was “the only American citizen kidnapped alive on October 7th who did not return alive.” In direct, plainspoken language that steers clear of politics, the author, a Jewish educator, recounts “being in a daze of the most indescribably sickening horror and fear, like nothing I had ever felt in my life. I remember my heart racing and feeling like I was in a permanent state of someone scaring me.” In addition to “shovel[ing] out my pain in the form of words,” she shares reminiscences of her son, as well as details that only a parent could notice. “His eyes were cookies,” she says of her “Hershy.” “I couldn’t find the pupils within the dark chocolate-brown irises.…He had a raspy voice, even when he was a baby.” And: “I thought he was hilarious; his sarcasm and humor were similar to mine.” Hersh and his sisters, Leebie and Orly, adapted well to life in Israel after the family moved from Richmond, Virginia. (Hersh was born in the Bay Area.) After being discharged from his service in the Israeli army as a combat medic, he was planning to journey around the world—a longtime dream of his. “So many people have come to love you, Hersh,” Jon Polin writes in the book’s afterword. And with one simple word that has the power to touch any heart, he signs off: “Dada.”
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9798217198009
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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