Blackbird
A Childhood Lost and Found
-
-
4.5 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $24.99
-
- $24.99
Publisher Description
With the startling emotional immediacy of a fractured family photo album, Jennifer Lauck's incandescent memoir is the story of an ordinary girl growing up at the turn of the 1970s and the truly extraordinary circumstances of a childhood lost. Wrenching and unforgettable, Blackbird will carry your heart away.
The house on Mary Street was home to Jennifer; her older brother B.J.; their hardworking father, who smelled like aftershave and read her Snow White; and their mother, who called her little daughter Sunshine and embraced Jackie Kennedy's sense of style. Through a child's eyes, the skies of Carson City were forever blue, and life was perfect -- a world of Barbies, Bewitched, and the Beatles. Even her mother's pain from her mysterious illness could be patted away with hairspray, powder, and a kiss on the cheek....But soon, everything Jennifer has come to love and rely on begins to crumble, sending her on a roller coaster of loss and loneliness. In a world unhinged by tragedy, where beautiful mothers die and families are warped by more than they can bear, a young girl must transcend a landscape of pain and mistreatment to discover her richest resource: her own unshakable will to survive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Prefaced by a medical report summarizing her mother's various hospitalizations, this heartbreaking memoir reconstructs the sad and turbulent events of Lauck's childhood, which was overshadowed by the illness and early death of her mother. In 1969, five-year-old Lauck stayed with her mother at their home in Carson City, Nev., preparing her mother's breakfast, helping her get dressed on good days and basking in the warmth of her mother's undivided attention while her older brother was at school and her father at work. When her mother's health continued to decline (among other things, she suffered from a duodenal ulcer and tumors), Lauck's father was advised to seek better care in California. The move was traumatic, for it separated Lauck from the only home she knew and from her caring, extended family. At her mother's urging, Lauck told no one at her school of her mother's illness, fearing the interference of social welfare authorities. After her mother died in 1971, when Lauck was seven, her father quickly remarried, bestowing on his children a classically evil stepmother, and leaving Lauck feeling powerless to complain about her new misery to her often absent father. Lauck's writing is utterly convincing, although the child narrator's innocent voice sometimes leaves the reader wondering how her father could have been so blind to his children's welfare or why their extended family did not step in sooner to help these unhappy children. Throughout, Lauck, who is now in her 30s, remains true to her child's eye and keeps the reader sympathetic and engaged. Fans of emotionally powerful books--or anyone who has lost a parent--will find this memoir very satisfying.
