Review of America's Boy: A Memoir (Hardcover)

America's Boy is a brutally funny, heartbreakingly honest account of a boy struggling to grow up in the Missouri Ozarks (Wade would prefer being a Winnie the Pooh children's clothing model to gigging frogs and catching catfish barehanded!). Reading the memoir is like sitting with a good friend in front of a camp fire and trading those difficult stories of growing up and family that we all share. What sets this book apart from an inundated field, however, is the honesty and joy that the author brings to his story -- in spite of his struggles, there is a fondness and welcome brightness to his writing. He honors his past, his family and where he came from, in spite of how difficult his path was. This is a special book that will resonate with nearly everyone: Those who feel different, those who have ever felt that they had failed to meet parental expectations, those who have ever lost a loved one, those who have ever struggled to just be accepted as they are. I breezed through this book in just a couple of nights, and laughed, cried, and cheered the whole way. I can't wait to read Wade's coming books.



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Review of My Sister Life (Paperback)

I am ambivalent about this book. It is a page-turner; it is easy to read, and it is salacious. But it is also cold, distant, and doesn't offer anything particularly insightful about motivation or causes of the familial dysfunction, other than the mother's remoteness from her children and the father's diffidence.

I wondered at several times whether this was indeed biography, or just an elaborate fiction, along the lines of an earlier generation's "Go Ask Alice". A bit of Internet research suggests that it is indeed real, and that the author set out with a forensic-like dispassionate intent.

I suppose I had expected something a little bit more personal. I am pleased it does not have the schmaltzy tones of a bad telemovie. It certainly desrcibes in exquisite and distressingdetail the processes of mental and physical abuse, but it is all conveyed as a description of a specimen on a glass slide.

Read it, and don't weep - for there is no emotional connection made with this reader, at least!



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