Genre: Memoir
Description:
“If the Universe gave you the chance to deliver karmic justice, would
you do it?
Lynne Cantwell was the late-in-life child of parents who had already
lost a baby daughter. Her brother, ten years older, delivered emotional and
verbal abuse for as long as she could remember. As a young adult, she moved
halfway across the country to escape him.
Decades later, when their mother’s health began to fail, Lynne was
forced to work with her brother – first to keep their mother in their childhood
home, and then to prepare the house for a sale that never happened. Everything
changed, but the family dynamics stayed the same.
This book – entertaining and heart-wrenching by turns – is a tale of
the way abuse plays out across generations, and of what it takes to end it.”
Author:
“Lynne Cantwell has been writing fiction since the second grade, when
the kid who sat in front of her showed her a book he had written, and she
thought, "I could do that." The result was Susie and the Talking Doll, a picture book illustrated by the
author about a girl who owned a doll that not only could talk, but could carry
on conversations. The book had dialogue but no paragraph breaks.
Today, after a twenty-year career in broadcast journalism and a
master's degree in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins University (or perhaps
despite the master's degree), Lynne is still writing fantasy. She is also a
contributing author at Indies Unlimited. She lives near Washington, DC.”
Appraisal:
Memoir is an interesting genre in that I suspect the reason someone
might choose to read a book in the genre is going to vary more from person to
person and from book to book than with other genres. You might choose to read a
memoir to better understand someone different from you or the exact opposite,
as a way to remind yourself that there are people with the same difficulties or
struggles as you have. It might be to learn more about someone you’d like to
emulate, or to get an idea of how to deal with a person or situation. Or maybe
the memoir is just something a particular reader thinks sounds like an
interesting or entertaining story.
All of that is a long prelude to saying that the appeal of Mom’s Home for you could be vastly
different from what I liked about it, depending on the reader. Or it may have
no appeal at all. For some readers who have dealt with abusive family, need
ideas in doing so, or just want to know that others have found a way out,
that’s here for you. For me it made me thankful that I don’t have those issues,
glad that, as different as I and my siblings are, we have a relationship many,
maybe most, families don’t. It was an adventure and a story with an ending
that, while not exactly what I’d describe as completely happy, was a satisfying
conclusion. As a reader, pulling for the author, just like I would be for a
protagonist in a fictional tale, it was a good story. The funny thing about
real stories, something the author even mentioned at one point, is that in
fiction the story has to be credible. Sometimes in real life things happen that
are so out there that an author wouldn’t dare put them in fiction because the
reader would find them unrealistic. At times this sure pushed those limits as
only a true story can. And while I wasn’t thinking about it when I was reading
the story, I suspect I’ve learned a few new ways of dealing with difficult
people that could prove valuable in the future.
Format/Typo
Issues:
No significant issues.
Rating: ****
Four Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate
word count: 50-55,000 words
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