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 When in college, asha meets and marries a prisoner in a jail she visits for one of her classes. She is stunned by how intelligent, compassionate, and loveable Rashid is and believes he regrets his crime. She also believes that he will get out on his first opportunity, but she doesn’t want to have a baby while he’s in prison. When she finds herself pregnant for the first time, she has an abortion. The second time, she can’t bring herself to do so again, and has the baby, convinced that Rashid will be released soon. She never sees herself as a single mother, until Rashid gets in more trouble that he doesn’t deserve and asha leaves him, unable to continue on with a husband she may not have a future with. This is the story of asha’s struggle to cope as a single mother and her all-consuming love for her daughter, Risa.
I’m not a mother and my parents are still happily married, but I know single moms have it hard. Many of the people closest to me have just their mom and it’s always rough even if the father stays involved and pays child support. Despite that, I felt asha focused just a little too much on herself despite this love for her daughter. She develops alcoholism and tells her daughter that she needs “mommy time” on a very frequent basis; it’s hard to see how devoted she is when she keeps finding other things to spend her time with. She also sets a bad example with abusive relationships. This is all despite a good upbringing, a job, and a college education. I found significant, though, her candid admission of how difficult it is for a black woman alone and in general the stereotypes that surround her despite what she does to buck them. Seeing why an intelligent, beautiful woman would stay with an abusive man was a revelation to me; I still think I’d leave, especially if I had a young daughter who might be influenced by my actions.
I guess in the end I couldn’t really relate to this book, perhaps because asha’s experience is so outside of my own and because I don’t believe I’d make the choices she did. I also found it very depressing. That said, perhaps it’s important for me to read books like this in order to get a greater picture of the world outside of my own little bubble. I still don’t think anything could compel me to marry a prisoner, though, and from that perspective it’s very hard to understand asha or feel true sympathy for her despite all that suffering.
Check out Something Like Beautiful: One Single Mother’s Story on Amazon.
 The Walls family is probably unlike any other you’ve read about. Jeannette spends most of her childhood traveling around the country whenever the family gets in trouble, eating surplus food that they can find, playing games, and searching for a way to “make it big”. When they settle down, they are unhappier than they ever were before and in the end, each sibling must make their own way in life.
At first, I was amazed that anyone could ever live this way, more so that Jeannette seemed content with her adventurous life, although perhaps that’s just her memory speaking. It was clear to me that her parents, while completely crazy, loved her and her siblings. I think it’s moving that the book is titled The Glass Castle – the name of the house that her father always planned to build for the family, though he never manages it and becomes a simple drunk instead. Underneath this veneer of thrilling adventure, there is a strong sense of unhappiness, and as the book goes along, the unhappiness just gets stronger and stronger and I really started to feel the frustration of these children. It is certainly a tribute to them that at least three of them turned out to be successful adults, while the fourth is an unknown quantity.
This is a wonderful memoir, a triumph of the human spirit over adversity. It made me very angry at times, particularly given the incompetence of the Walls parents, but I think it was a worthy read. I can certainly see why its popularity endures.
Buy The Glass Castle on Amazon.
 Before this memoir even starts, we know that it is going to be sad and a baby is going to die. Following that first chapter, Elizabeth McCracken takes us on an emotional, brutally honest, heartrending journey through the loss of her first baby and the survival of her second, as she comes to terms with her loss (which will never go away) and ends up with a happy life.
If I was someone who regularly cried through books, this one would have had me going the entire way. As it was, it was so sad, like a window into the soul of this woman whose first child was stillborn. I recognize the feelings of a bereaved parent perhaps better than most, having watched my parents continue to go through it (although every grief is certainly different), and she struck perfectly, painfully true. People don’t know how to react to grief, and those parts hurt more than the rest; the friends who simply weren’t there, who acted like it had never happened. I’m sure most of us have lost someone, but I had never lost anyone until my brother died and it astonished me how many “friends” I had who didn’t say a word, while people barely on the edge of my acquaintance went out of their way to help however they could. Elizabeth’s experience as she realized who was there for her and who was not was so moving; I can’t imagine the difficulty of telling people who expected her to be a happy mother with a healthy baby that her child had passed away.
I thought the worst part was when Elizabeth knew her child had died and still had to give birth to him. What a horrible, horrible experience. I wanted to reach through the pages and hug her tight, even though I’ve never met her and probably never will.
Finally, I think reading about Elizabeth’s experience is important; since we struggle to deal with bereaved parents, her memoir will help us to understand just a tiny bit of what they may be feeling. I’d recommend it, but not if you’re looking for light reading. Buy this book on Amazon.
Thanks to Miriam Parker of Hachette Book Group USA for organizing this blog tour and sending this book to me! For more opinions and reviews, here are some other blogs on the tour:
 I love Russian history. I can hear you saying: “What? I thought you loved medieval history!”, which obviously I do, but Russian history is another one of those side interests of mine. I don’t love it enough to make it my life, but I find it fascinating. I did study Russian for 5 1/2 years, so a lot of my knowledge comes from reading stuff in Russian, and I think it’s the combination of the language and the history that makes it so enthralling to me. I’ve forgotten most of my Russian now, but I still have the stray thought float by in Russian; as I was reading this book, all the landmarks were automatically recognizable to me. Besides that, Russia is the only country that I’ve discovered so far where the history doesn’t get less interesting as time goes by. Generally my interest drops off once guns are invented, but with Russia, things just get more interesting.
So, I was very pleased to receive a review copy of Stalin’s Children, a memoir which covers three generations of a partly Russian family’s history in the 20th century. The author’s maternal family suffered greatly in the hands of Stalin’s purges; his grandfather, a loyal Party man, was shot and killed, his grandmother sent to a labor camp, and his mother and aunt separated and sent to orphanages, where they nearly starved. Matthews’ father, Mervyn, was a Welsh student enthralled with Russia and willing to do everything he could to get there; it’s not surprising that he fell in love with a Russian girl. The part that is surprising is their six year separation and the many love letters they sent to one another over the distance.
The beginning was particularly interesting. Stalin’s purges are, I think, well known, but we don’t often get such an intimate picture of a family torn apart by them. Many men who weren’t guilty of anything at all were sent to be killed or imprisoned permanently for no apparent reason other than extreme suspicion. Reading about this from Lenina and Lyudmila’s points of view brings home the suffering that they and many other families endured.
I think my own experience hindered my enjoyment of the rest of the book. You’d think that I would empathize and relate with Lyudmila and Mervyn, still in my own long-distance relationship with a foreigner. And I do to some extent; I could certainly feel the pain of their separation because it echoes mine so closely. I think the pain of being separated from someone you love above all others, not knowing when you’ll see them again, is universal. Nevertheless, I was actually bored by Mervyn’s endless struggle to free Mila. It seemed like pages and pages of him writing and trying to see various governmental officials went by, with excerpts from their copious love letters and woeful tales of how much Mila was suffering interspersed. I understood that it was a long time and it was very painful, but I had a lot of trouble feeling it once the initial separation was over. To be honest, it felt like a lot of complaining, and while they had to complain to get heard, I honestly just can’t take that much. I know that their separation is a great deal more difficult than mine and they didn’t even know if they’d end up together, but I just can’t stand when people complain about their long distance relationships. You’ll never catch me complaining about mine to anyone other than my fiance.
And then, this may be a spoiler here, she wasn’t happy when she got there. She was homesick, instead. We barely hear about how pleased Mervyn and Mila were that they finally got to be together after six years. Between you and me, I think they placed each other on pedestals too high to climb after all those letters. So I ended up very disappointed in the book’s outcome.
As for Owen’s own life story up until now, I think he did a fair job trying to bridge the Moscow of long ago with the Moscow of recent years. His parts were more like a contemporary memoir, and interwoven with the history they successfully demonstrated both how much and how little Russia has changed in the past 75 years.
I’m not sure I’ll recommend this one. I enjoyed the first half but was disappointed by the second half. Your opinion may vary, and in fact if you have reviewed this book and offer a more favorable opinion, please leave me a comment – I’ll link to your review in this post. Buy this book on Amazon.
 Tiny Kline spent her entire life doing stunts. From youth to middle age, she worked with the circus, her love for which is apparent throughout the pages of her memoir. She continued doing iron jaw stunts, descending inclines at ridiculous speeds suspended only by her teeth, into old age and performed as Tinker Bell at Disneyland when she was in her 70s. By all accounts, Tiny Kline had a fascinating life. She really wrote two memoirs in an attempt to share that life with us. One contained mainly personal anecdotes, related to her work on the circus. The second mainly contained circus history and was stripped of these more intimate details. The editor, Janet M. Davis, combined the two to produce a memoir that is still Tiny’s but in a form readers will be more eager to consume.
This book was a very educational experience. Circus history, while an interesting topic, is not something that I’ve ever learned in school and there don’t seem to be many accessible books written on it. There is the fiction bestseller, Water for Elephants, which I read and loved earlier this year, but that’s about all I’ve seen on my book radar. When this popped up on LT Early Reviewers, I knew that I simply must read it. And good choice by me; this is a terrific memoir. The combination of memoirs is brilliantly done and I never noticed a gap between Tiny’s two styles of writing. It’s fascinating to see how the circus changed over time, the insider’s view of circus politics, and just how some performers climbed the career ladder faster than others. Tiny’s ambition was tremendous and it’s easy to see why she advances so quickly.
The book does read precisely as someone’s account of their life. Tiny was not the best writer and it’s evident at times that she had little training, but it never hampers this book, just makes the author more real, if that is possible. It reads like a letter written by a friend; conversational, easy tone. There were some nice touches put in by the editor, such as including photographs with Tiny’s descriptions of some of her fellow performers, all bringing the circus to life. Tiny admits one lapse in her introduction; she included some fictional romances to make the book more “exciting”, even though she never had a romantic interlude after her husband died shortly after their wedding. The fictional parts are obvious and only in one part of the book; I don’t count this against it, especially as she admits their existence before the book even begins.
I’d definitely be recommending this book and if you’re interested in circus history, you shouldn’t miss it. I’m glad that I didn’t! Buy this book on Amazon.
Many thanks to Michael Roux and the University of Illinois Press for sending me this lovely book!
 As a teen and young adult, Ariel Sabar always thought his father Yona was a bit strange. Yona had immigrated twice in his life, from Zakho in Iraq to Israel to the US. When Ariel had his own son, he realized the errors he had wrought and set about learning the story of his family’s past in Kurdish Iraq and Israel to help him reconnect with his father, an internationally renowned professor at UCLA, and preserve history. This book traces his family’s journey, starting with his grandmother, moving on to his father’s academic rise, and finishing with his own journey to Zakho.
This was an excellent book. It reads like a novel at times, with bits of history and folklore intertwined with the Sabar family’s past. I couldn’t wait to get back to it when I wasn’t reading it, because I really wanted to know more about this fascinating family. I feel that there aren’t enough books that really center in on the Middle East and its vast changes that are accessible to ordinary people, but this book bridges the gap beautifully.
It also tells the universal story of the immigrant; searching for better opportunities and rarely finding them. I’ve read about this situation a lot with American immigrants. The only way I’d heard about this in respect to Israel before was through my Jewish friends at Brandeis University, some of whose parents and grandparents had had journeys similar to Yona’s. So not only is Sabar recording his family’s history, he is also chronicling that of an entire group of displaced persons, the Kurds. I was astounded by the attitude of other Jews in Israel to them; I thought Israel was the promised land and that all people were equal and welcomed there. It may be that way now, which is what modern Jews tell me, but it certainly wasn’t the case 50 years ago when Yona Sabar’s family immigrated there.
This book contains a story that is immersive, historical, and human. I definitely recommend it. Buy this book on Amazon.
 This half-memoir, half-journal, was penned before and immediately after Agnès Humbert’s horrific experience as a French political prisoner of the Nazis. Agnès was a courageous woman, full of spirit and defiance, holding her love of France and desire for independence above all, even the worst treatment at the hands of inconsiderate jailers who did not mind if the prisoners lived or died, let alone suffered, so long as the work got done. Her journal chronicles her activism for the underground newspaper Résistance before her arrest, and afterwards moves on to a memoir style account of her time in prison and in various labor camps and factories before her eventual rescue by the Americans in 1945.
I found her newpaper days to be slightly over my head; they are full of names and I never quite managed to work out just who was who, or which of the members survived and which were killed. I did admire her sense of independence; she never masked who anyone was in her journal, seemingly certain that no Nazi would ever find it. She retains her composure under questioning and in the torturous jail cells, never revealing any of her compatriots, though most of them seem to be caught regardless. Her experience was consistently horrifying and it’s almost impossible to imagine human beings could treat each other so abominably. I know much about the experience of the Jews and other “rejected” minorities at the hands of the Nazis; I’ve been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, which is a place that everyone should visit for their own education and to help prevent future genocides (which we aren’t doing very well at). I never heard much about political prisoners, however, or their ordeals in labor camps and factories rather than in the death camps. These, of course, are still horrific.
Reading about Agnès’ suffering was extremely affecting and upsetting. I’m sure I would have committed suicide in her position like so many of the other girls did. Remarkably, Agnès retained her spirit and when she was released, immediately set about helping the Americans with their occupation of Germany and attempts to catch the remaining Nazis and Nazi sympathizers.
I’d recommend this book; it’s an account of one woman’s experience that really applied to many other prisoners. Agnès’ chronicle can help to ensure that these atrocities are not committed again. Buy this book on Amazon.
 For three generations of Chinese women, a restaurant is the key to their livelihood. It starts with Lily, who is born in a small Chinese town, moves to Hong Kong, and eventually to Great Britain to make her fortune for her two small children. Lily’s daughter Mabel opens her own restaurant in an attempt to recoup family fortunes, so her daughter Helen, the author of this book, grows up in a takeaway. Though she graduates from Cambridge and earns a law degree, Helen and her two sisters decide to open a restaurant of their own – Sweet Mandarin.
I enjoyed the story of these three women. More of the book is dedicated to Lily than to Mabel and Helen, but that seems almost the way it should be, since it was Lily who really made the biggest changes in her family’s fortunes. Lily’s story is also the most interesting, because her life reads like a novel, full as it is of twists and turns of fate. Beyond that, it is absolutely fascinating to witness the changes in China, Hong Kong, and British imperialism in general throughout the book. It is astounding to witness the vast differences in some areas of the world, while other ways of life in China remain basically the same as they were when Lily was a child. For this reason, my favorite part of the book was their visit to Hong Kong towards the end.
Helen Tse writes the story of her family’s fortunes as a memoir, which made it a pleasure to read. I felt for Lily, Mabel, and Helen throughout their stories and really enjoyed the way cooking and restaurants tied the whole book together, with the exception of some of Lily’s experiences (although I enjoyed those too, and they’re necessary to set up the rest of the book). The common thread of food ran through and it’s admirable that Helen and her sisters have embraced and retained their heritage in this way.
I’d recommend this book, especially to people who enjoy memoirs. It has a solid, interesting story and Helen’s family is a memorable one. Buy this book on Amazon.
You can also view an interview with the author on YouTube or visit the book’s website.
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