Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found Review

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(More customer reviews)I was up until 4 a.m. finishing Jennifer Lauck's gripping story of her childhood. The pages seemed to turn themselves as I followed the early loss of her tenderhearted mother, her panicky father's remarriage, and her experiences at the hands of a neurotic stepmother. What makes this debut all the more impressive is Lauck's clear and compelling prose style. Early in the book, the childlike tone seems potentially grating, but the reader is quickly drawn under Lauck's spell as that voice rapidly hardens and matures in the face of a tough life. More important, there's an astonishing lack of self-pity that makes the story all the more chilling. This is not one of those horrifying stories of child abuse and molestation that, no matter how shocking, we like to think of as happening on the fringes of society. Instead, this is a straightforward recounting of life's circumstantial horrors, namely what happens to children when the people who are supposed to take care of them die and there's no one to take the adults' places. It seems too easy (and unfair) to compare her to Mary Karr, but Lauck displays the same surefootedness and narrative tautness that kept readers of "The Liars Club" enthralled. The only happy ending is her smiling author photo, and I don't know if I could have gone to sleep as dawn approached except that her acknowledgements thanked a husband and son for an unconditional love that she thought she'd never feel again.I'm thankful for Jennifer Lauck's happy adult life (and I feel the need after this glowing review to say that I don't know the woman at all), and I'm thankful as well for the talents that allowed her to turn an incredibly painful childhood into a gripping piece of literature.

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The Poisonwood Bible Review

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(More customer reviews)I read Kingsolver's earlier "Pigs in Heaven" and "Bean Trees." I picked up "The Poisonwood Bible" on impluse to read while on vacation. Once I started reading it, I found it hard to put down.
I have never had much interest in African history, but this book made me want to find out more. Her characters, as in her earlier books, are very well realized and fascinating. The story begins with the arrival in the Belgian Congo of Nathan Price, fire and brimstone Baptist preacher, and his reluctant family. The family's story is told by Nathan's wife, Orleanna, and their five daughters - shallow teen-age Rachel, twins Leah and Adah, and five-year-old Ruth May. The voices of the characters are authentic and believable.
Other reviewers are correct in their assessment that this is, in a sense, two books. The first is about Nathan's clumsy and ill-advised attempts to fit Africa to his fundamentalist beliefs, and the family's attempts to fit their lives to Africa. The second is about the way a family tragedy marks its survivors and the different ways events in Africa mark them as well. I don't agree that Kingsolver should have "stopped writing" at the end of the first part.
I was absolutely spellbound by the way the voices changed and the way they stayed the same from the first to the last of the book. One believes in the characters, they change and grow as the book progresses. Other reviewers found Rachel grating, but I think that was the point. Her shallowness brought home the points that Kingsolver was making even more effectively than the earnest preaching by Leah. I got the sense that in her own way, Rachel understood the events perfectly well, but that she did not care.
I felt very complete when I finished the book. It was a satisfying experience.

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