Uphill Walkers
Portrait of a Family
-
- 10,99 €
-
- 10,99 €
Descrição da editora
“The story of a family, united by blood, pride, and the bonds that defy logic” from the national bestselling author of In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle (Ellen Kanner, The Miami Herald).
In 1952, Madeleine Blais’s father died suddenly, leaving his pregnant wife and their five young children to face their future alone. Uphill Walkers is the story of how the Blais family pulled together to survive and ultimately thrive in an era when a single-parent family was almost unheard-of. As they came of age in an Irish-American household that often struggled to make ends meet, the Blais children would rise again and again above all obstacles—at every step of the way inspired by a mother who expected much but gave even more, as she saved and sacrificed to provide each child with the same education they would have received had their father lived.
Beautiful, heartbreaking, and full of wonderful insights about sisterhood, brotherhood, and the ties that bind us together, Uphill Walkers is a moving portrait of the love it takes to succeed against the odds—and what it means to be a family.
“This is a book about a real family, the kind we used to know before Reality TV; it’s about resilience and love, told with heart and grace.” —St. Petersburg Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Blais (author of In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle,a high school basketball team narrative that was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in 1995) turns her impressive reporting skills to her own 1950s rural Massachusetts childhood in this occasionally dense memoir. Her attraction to journalism, she explains toward the end of the book, is rooted in its "power to capture... what was real, the music of what happens, and to impound all those details that defy embellishment," yet it proves to be a power that both benefits and bogs down her memoir. For the most part, Blais evokes her family with verve, particularly her widowed mother's feisty spirit in the face of raising six young children on her own in 1952. Any Catholic school alum will relate to Blais's disgust when she relates such incidents as how her priest co-opted the pop tune "To know, know, know him is to love, love, love him," making it into a religious creed. But her analysis of such minutiae as the ads and articles surrounding her father's obituary can overwhelm her narrative. Her account would have benefited from firmer editing, given the wealth of family specifics. Besides her mother, Blais touches on her five siblings' lives, including an older brother whose mental illness surprisingly dominates the end of the book. Still, the flashes of brilliance in Blais's brushwork such as the scene where she and sister Jacqueline, now an editor at USA Today, finally discovered how to use their new vocabulary word "lapis lazuli" make it worth wading through her sometimes overreported journey into her past.