Poignant, intimate, powerful
929756
First, let me ask, plead with the author of this book, Kathleen Hewtson, please write another book like this, your insight is awe-inspiring.

Yes, there it is, The Night My Husband Killed Me is intense, intimate, yet distancing. The title is kind of off-putting; but, I promise, once you glance at this book, once you begin reading it, you will not be able to put it down.

The book draws you in, very closely, but lets the reader maintain some distance. Each wife, speaking as a murder victim, then as a spirit beyond, tells you about herself, her life, her husband, their marriage what went right between wife and husband what went not-so-right Hewtson's deft ability to let the wives' speak of their own self-perceived flaws, missteps, mistakes was poignant, bittersweet, I cannot find the words

Murder, cold-blooded, calculated murder, brutal slayings, of these wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, is evil; but to listen to these four women speaking almost dispassionately, after, speaking of how very real, human, confused, objective they are is almost uplifting, certainly for me it was other-worldly.
867110
This book touched me in so many ways. It is at once a memoir of the author's somewhat hidden and tumultuous gay life, as well as a beautiful but achingly honest tribute to both of his parents, as he watches his mother's life wind down. There are many funny, beautiful and poignant moments here...definitely a worthwhile read.
931006
As I've contemplated my review of Motherhood: Lost and Found, a quote keeps coming to mind.  Although I am not exactly sure who said this, the quote says, "we read to know we are not alone", and that is exactly how you'll feel when you finish this book - "I'm not alone."

Ann's memoir is about her struggle to become a mom while simultaneously dealing with her mom's debilitating descent into Alzheimer's disease.  If you can identify with either of Ann's struggles, or God forbid both, you will feel that you've been on a journey with a warm companion, someone who offers encouragement, strength and compassion.

I know that one of Ann's biggest desires in writing this book is to offer help and hope to those who are going through similar situations, and I think she successfully accomplishes this with her memoir.

However, you need not experience either of these situations in order to benefit from the reading of this beautifully written memoir.  We all are a part of humanity, with all of its pain, brokenness and fragility, and we are strengthened and encouraged when we share our stories with one another; there is comfort in the sharing and the knowledge that we are not alone in the struggles of this life.

Additionally, reading the unfamiliar struggles of others allows us to walk in the shoes of another and develop genuine empathy and compassion for those whose life experiences differ from our own.

This memoir is both well written and highly readable.  Ann has a wonderful way with words; she is, after all, a poet and, as an aside, is single-handedly responsible for causing me to like poetry!

Her writing is poignant; she writes with a vulnerability and honesty that I've rarely seen, and it is both beautiful and heart warming.  I could hardly put this book down until I finished it, and I warmly recommend it to you.

Traci W. Hooks
3301024
On its face, the story of this enthralling memoir is a devastating one - a young couple caught in the midst of the First Gulf War and the toll it takes on them and their relationship. But 'Black Elephants' is told with such warmth and grace and yes, humor, that it transcends the violence of its setting. This is a book filled with beauty, illuminating a very specific time and place, both of which have been overwhelmed by more recent history. Ms Nielsen writes with the precision and clear-sightedness of the journalist, but also the voice of the poet. Above all, she comes across as a friend, someone unsparing of herself and her story, while also thoughtful and generous. This book is at once tough and tender, and never less than completely true.
2893615
This is an excellent read told with wonderful character development, emotional depth, complexity and honesty. Avi Morris' book is  the fictionalized story of a young girl's abuse and neglect, and her and others' conflicted journeys. I bring to this review the vantage point of having been a county social worker for many years, working with children and adolescents in dysfunctional families, with foster parents, the courts, the schools, the bureaucracy, including the various support (and sometimes not so supportive) systems.  Morris has captured it all, beautifully, poignantly. A powerful book you won't easily put down... or forget.
1321788
This is one of the most honest and powerful books I've read in a long time. Told from the point-of-view of a bigamist's two daughters, it traces the complicated and painful knots tied by a man trying to keep his 2 families separate but equal. They are never equal, of course, and the tension builds and builds as both daughters try to understand their place in his heart, try to figure out who is first, and wrestle all the missing pieces away from each other.

Jones is a master at conveying the complexities of her characters--their selfish sides, their loving sides--and all the pain that can come from normal people craving normal things: love, life, security, family. It's a captivating story, but the last third will grab you so hard, you'll still be feeling it long after the book is done. A smart, captivating and brilliantly imagined novel.
302694
Intimate view of another time, culture, and experience.
1480661
A devastatingly beautiful collection. Choi has a knack for finding those quiet spaces between emotions in life, those ineffable moments with our parents as we stand between their two lives-the before us and with us-- and those moments of loss, longing, and love which clash at high speeds and render us awestruck and helpless. Here they are, rendered concretely enough to touch, beautifully enough to move the reader. In a world of hyperbole, this book is a quiet moment of humanity.
2903175
Jeneva's book is a brilliant meditation on what it means to be human as well as a moving and intensely personal story of her relationship with her son who is severely disabled. It's a small book but packed with poetic power. I will be dipping into it to re-read for a long time.
864438
I finished A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life And Death Of My Husband, Danny Pearl the other day. In some ways it reminds me of Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Both take place mostly in Pakistan and both are so powerful that you reflect on them for days and even weeks to come. Both have some rough language but it was nearly transparent to me as the heart-wrenching frustrations in each story resulting in such words were so overwhelming that I hardly noticed the harsh and sometimes foul words, normally foreign to me.

I remember when this occurred as the world held it's breath for five long weeks, sending up prayers in many languages for Danny's safe return. He was a reporter and the South Asia Bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. Danny put himself in harm's way to shed some light to the side of the news that might bring about world understanding. Instead, in this instance, it brought a type of horror that proved to be both universal and yet painfully personal for his wife, Mariane, who was pregnant with their first child, a son.

On January 23, 2002, on his way to what he thought was an interview at a village restaurant in Karachi, Pearl was kidnapped by the militant group, "The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty." This group claimed Danny (of Jewish heritage and an American) was a CIA agent. Before he left for the interview, he told Mariane that he might be late for dinner. He never returned.

Mariane's riveting account of realizing her husband was missing and working to help the authorities piece it all together, leading up to Danny's eventual and brutal murder will leave you forever changed. Mariane is also an award-winning journalist and shares a very detailed step-by-step account of what took place. Surprisingly, interwoven throughout every page of the book, is a love story so intimate, intense and tender that you'll find often yourself smiling and feeling very privileged to "know" these remarkable people, including those surrounding Mariane... each with their own "mighty heart."

I listened to this as a "book on CD" which is read by Mariane. You really need to concentrate to understand her as she was born of an Afro-Chinese-Cuban mother and Dutch-Jewish father in France. Mariane was raised in Paris and with her interesting heritage she has a very unique accent, to me anyway. It's a good thing that you have to listen so carefully as you want to catch every detail and no one else would ever be able to tell the story as she does. It's a story I shall not soon forget. It makes you grateful and also sad but leaves you in awe of the courage of so many of our brothers and sisters half-way around the world, especially Mariane, whose heart is every bit as mighty as her husband's.
3652310
"The Yokota Officers Club" is not only a convincing coming-of-age account of a daughter of a peripatetic military family; it is a sensitive and evocative exploration of the themes of family tension, hidden secrets and repressed fears.  Author Sarah Bird, drawing on her own life's experience as a "military brat," has created a magnificent protagonist in the isolated and marginalized Bernadette "Bernie" Root, whose profound alienation from her life's circumstances compels her to discover the root souce of her quietly agonizing loneliness.  Written with genuine compassion and insight, the novel is a stunning success.
The Roots emerge as an archtypical military family.  Bernie's father, Mace, a heroic pilot whose storied career has been scythed by a decision beyond the comprehension of his family, is not only icily dictatorial at home; he is an emotionally stunted husband and father who issues orders and synchronizes and subordinates his wife and children to his floundering prospects for promotion.  Kit, Bernie's younger sister, is everything her older sister is not.  Gregarious, glamorous and charismatic, Kit adapts to the flux and transitory nature of the Roots' lives.  She stands in dramatic counterpoint to the silent suffering of Bernie, a reserved, introspective intellectual, who, seemingly by osmosis, aborbs the pain, frustration and bitterness exuded by her mother, Moe.  Not even called mother by her daughter, Moe is a strong, self-possessed woman whose decision to marry into a military life generates recriminations, unspoken bitterness and near manic combat with the restrictions of being the wife of an Air Force officer during the Cold War period of the 1950s and the escalating violence of Viet Nam in the 1960s.
Set in the pivotal year of 1968, the novel revolves around Bernie's willed exploration of her family's past, one which pivots around their extended stay at the Yokota Air Force Base in Japan during the 1950s.  There, the family's maid, Fumiko, becomes both a physical and psychological presence that somehow holds the secret to both the father's demise and the family's deterioration into emotional dysfunction.  Bird is nothing less than brilliant as she explores the layered relationships Fumiko has with Mace, Moe and Bernie and how those relationships catalyze the tumultous changes within the family.
Using the effective metaphor of smells, fascinating and complex characterization, and powerful use of selective memory, Sarah Bird's novel instructs as well as recounts.  Bernie's anguish, her isolated alienation and her deeply-felt sense of personal inferiority transform the plot into a serious analysis of troubling feelings most of us experience at the hands of our family.  To what degree do children assume responsibility for the sharp shards of parental discontent?  How do combative siblings resolve mutual animosity and mistrust?  Are silences and repressed secrets effective means of eliminating parental frustration and betrayal?  How much does a man owe his country, and to what extent does a wife owe her husband blind allegiance?  "The Yokota Officers Club" answers these profoundly vital questions with courage, insight and grace.  This memoir-like novel is little less than exceptional.
4443044
Anne Serling brings her father to life on every page of this memoir, showing him a complete person both connected to, and apart from, the Twilight Zone. Anne shares family moments and stories, quotes generously from his letters and writings, includes photos, mementoes, private recollections only she as his daughter would have.  Beautifully, descriptively written, readers discover what it was like to have had such a loving, creative father; how certain events, from childhood to war,  impacted his life; behind-the-scenes perspectives on his achievements; insightful revelations of  where reality intertwined with fiction;  how it felt to lose him; then amid grief, to rediscover and re-connect with him through that which overcomes the great divide: memory, imagination, stories, love. The flawlessly linear, thoroughly objective, scholarly or journalistic style of biography is something completely different. This is a remembrance from experience. Thoughtful, moving, heartfelt and  heartbreaking. Anybody in their right mind wants to change how soon he was gone.

  Looked forward to sharing this book with my sister but life events intervened, causing delays that altered the narrative. Instead, it became the first book I read after she passed away. Anne Serling's reflective tribute to her beloved father would become, most unexpectedly,  beneficial in my own grieving process. Literary assurance that one can survive a life-altering, personally shattering experience and isolating circumstance, eventually recovering some kind of workable perspective. Her book, in the unassuming guise of memoir, artfully illuminates what is truly important in life. That how we influence and remember one another matters.  That to carry on is essential. Living to tell, worthwhile. Love is in small stories, picturesque details, quiet conversations, hand-written pages, shared episodes - always within walking distance of  the heart.
3362721
"The Distance Between Us" is an extraordinarily powerful, beautifully crafted novel. Masha Hamilton's prose is, at times, luminescent and lyrical, and at others, spare and almost brutal in its honesty. She paints here a poignant portrait of a woman facing a major crossroad in her life which will change her forever. This novel is more a sensitive psychological study than a book with an action driven plot.

Catherine (Caddie) Blair is an American journalist stationed in Jerusalem, who has been covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for years. She prizes her professional detachment and shies away from anything that smacks of sentimentality. It is important to keep her emotions under wraps in both her writing and in her personal life. "Reflect the story; don't absorb it," is her creed, "because if you allow yourself to feel the full force of sorrows and horrors, you will succumb to them."

On a trip to Lebanon for an important interview, Caddie's Land Rover is ambushed and her lover, Marcus, is killed. His death stuns her; shakes her to the core. She, who has covered so many battles, so much violence, finds herself musing at the many colors of a loved one's blood. Accustomed to holding her emotions in check, she doesn't know what to do with the onslaught of feelings that threaten to overpower her. For the first time that she can remember her reporter's gift of perfect recall is gone, as is her ability to be a cautious observer. She fears that after this life-altering event, she will never be "restored to even an accepted facsimile of what she was before."

Ordered back to New York for R&R by her editor, Caddie persuades him to let her remain longer in Jerusalem under the guise of writing a feature story on the "effects of violence." Overwhelmed with rage, a need for revenge, survivor's guilt, (Would Marcus have accompanied her if she hadn't asked him to do the photography for her article?), Caddie searches for a response to the murder. She considers revenge, retaliation, among other possible solutions. Compelled to act, she needs to do something that will bring her peace and allow her to move on with her life. And she longs to write something to compensate for all the barriers which sometimes got in the way of her stories. "A piece that will show intimately how violence shreds sleep and appetite and memory, disfiguring those it leaves behind. A story that will get close enough to give violence a human face."

Ms. Hamilton brings her characters to life on these pages, especially Caddie. She is developed lovingly, and the changes she makes in the novel's 279 pages are intense and deeply felt. The novel's secondary characters are phenomenal, real originals - from interfering, gossipy Ya'el to Mr. Gruizin, who paints a red stripe on the mailbox of any out-of-town neighbor - to ensure their healthy return. There's mad Anya, who shouts and whispers her prophecies from street corners, Mrs. Weizman, always ready with her chicken soup to feed Caddie, and Goronsky, the man who suddenly enters Caddie's life and helps her define her ethical limits. The characters have one principal commonality - they have all been scarred and altered by violence.

The author's vivid descriptions of Jerusalem brings that city to life. Her landscapes, images of light refracting against Jerusalem stone, the contradictory mix of the city`s inhabitants, the frenzy of everyday activity and the silence of Shabbat, evoke a timelessness and enrich the novel tremendously. This is a rare book - a real find. Highly recommended!

Masha Hamilton has actually worked for The Associated Press as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East and has covered the Intifada. This firsthand experience is evident in the story's detailed development.
JANA
3612928
A beautiful and intimate glimpse into a couple's life, Love, Sex, and Other Miscommunications captivated me as a wife, a woman, and a lover.  Easy to read, and absolutely delighting in the moments of raw authenticity on how hard, and beautiful love is.  Intimate moments laid bare in their glorious beauty, acknowledging the difficulties that will inevitably also come.  Finding magic in every day moments, and stealing kisses in the hallway; detailing the transitions of a woman's constant evolution alongside that of her beloved.
611871
Susan Broughers autobiographical tale of the loss of her mother is searing in its intensity. Beautifully written, this wonderful book pulls the reader intimately into the authors story.

When she was just a teenager, 14 years old, her mother died of cancer.  Her mother had been her close anchor; she had been there to encourage her and surround her with love. Without her loving mother, she felt lost. Her father, wrapped up in his own grief, was not there for Susan and her three siblings.

Susan Brougher artfully tells her story. The book is alive with the sights and smells of the seasons of the year, both with the awareness of the present and the memories of the past. Interweaved with the pain of growing up with grief and loss, is her struggle to find self-confidence and her own self again.

A very special addition to her book is the delicate drawings of flowers that are interspersed throughout her book; each flower reminds Susan of some aspect of her mother.

I definitely recommend this book to all who have suffered loss.
1361870
I have owned this book for 3 weeks now, delving back into it, over and over, to re-read and experience the poems inside, and I struggled that amount of time to find the words to write this review. The conflict for me has been that Sarah's pain and reality expressed on these pages is raw and piercing and unapologetic, yet I found such beauty and power in her honesty and in her expression. The poems take the reader on a journey through Sarah's exploration of her own identity, reflecting on her color in a white-washed world and both the pain and pleasure of being a woman, her experiences with both love and heartache, and falling into the depths of despair and courageously finding her way back out. In her poetry, she is at once equally vulnerable and powerful. I am in awe of her talent and look forward to reading more from this poet.
2603679
This review refers to the NetGalley edition.

Waking Sleep Beauty Freak came to me in a timely manner just like the "strange angels" Nina Lora talks about in this very intimate, very poignant memoir of love, lust, marriage, divorce, and recovery. I have so many highlights in my ebook I couldn't possibly comment on them all here.

This book will not be for everyone. It is catharsis at its best, and it feels like a very intimate exchange with the author in which she is just laying it all out there because she NEEDS to, and doesn't care if you judge her. If you appreciate writing as art and not just entertainment, then you will likely find the power behind this memoir stirring, as I did.

There is a quote that I want to include here to illustrate the power behind her words, but I need to check against the final edition first, as the NetGalley was barely edited. I will update this review when I have confirmed.

Her style is best described as stream-of-consciousness, and it feels like a diary at times. At about the halfway point I decided this book reminds me most of High Fidelity by Nick Hornby if it was a memoir written by a female.

It is the perfect book to be read by someone facing the end of a long-term relationship, particularly a marriage, and is struggling to organize her thoughts amid the devastation. Lora takes you into the chaos and gives you something to hold on to as it swirls.