Review by Booklist Review
McLain was only four when her mother left to go to the movies with her boyfriend and never came back. McLarin and her two sisters, Theresa and Penny, moved from their grandmother's house to their father's sister's and then to foster care until their father could get the means together to raise them. They lived with two families before their father came to claim them. He took them home to live with his new wife, Donna, and their children, but when he landed in jail for the second time, the girls were sent back to foster care. They finally ended up with the Linberghs--Bub, Hilde, and their daughter, Tina. The endless shuttling from family to family ended, but the girls still felt alone. Hilde was cold and distant; Bub was affectionate until the girls hit puberty, and then a little too affectionate; and Tina was spoiled and bossy. When McLain was 20, something unexpected and startling happened: her mother resurfaced. Observant and yet somewhat guarded, McLain has written a straightforward and moving memoir. --Kristine Huntley
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The teenage years are trying for many, but they're downright hellish for those abandoned by their parents and shuffled from foster home to foster home. Such is the painfully obvious message of McLain's memoir. Sparing no harsh details, McLain recounts the 15-year span during the 1970s and early '80s when she and her sisters endured all sorts of hardships at the hand of so-called parents, even including sexual and physical abuse. The girls never felt accepted by or connected to anyone, and these identity conflicts only amplified their normal teenage insecurities. McLain has won recognition for her poetry from the NEA and with a grant from the Academy of American Poets for her first book, Less of Her. She displays her poetic inclinations with florid descriptions of every person and place she encountered and concrete illustrations of her feelings. Recalling the first uncomfortable moment upon entering the first strange house as an eight-year-old, she writes, "the distance between the door and the couch seemed vast and unnavigable, like the distance between Baretta and dinner, evening and morning, tomorrow and next week. We sat down." Although McLain's constant embellishments and fixation on superfluous character development detract from a consistent narrative thread, this is a brave account, evidently cathartic for the author and occasionally difficult for the reader. Agent, Leigh Feldman. (Mar. 18) Forecast: Little, Brown is positioning this book as "a real-life White Oleander." It probably will resonate among the Oprah crowd, if it can rise above the current deluge of women's memoirs. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
McLain, a one-time English teacher and aspiring novelist, offers a real-life version of White Oleander that strikes as fiercely as its fictional counterpart-if not more so. With credibility and tension, she strings together shards of childhood memories to create a portrait as riveting as it is sad. The book opens in the early 1970s, as McLain and her two sisters, having been abandoned by their parents, struggle to survive the Fresno County, CA, foster care system. Readers are gently shuttled from the last time McLain saw her mother (until 16 years later) to the first time she was molested by a foster father, to the 11 tumultuous and sometimes torturous years she spent at her fourth and final home. With her sisters by her side (luckily, they were never separated), McLain learned the importance of blood family in the absence of a functional day-to-day one. Never self-pitying, she nurtures her story as she wanted to be nurtured. It is clear that McLain wants to understand what happened to her childhood and why; this book is the beginning of her answer. Recommended for all collections.-Rachel Collins, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An unsentimental and thus telling memoir by the middle of three sisters who grew up in a series of foster homes in Fresno, California. Their father was already in prison for a bumbled robbery attempt when their mother went to a movie with a boyfriend and didn't come back. It was 1970: Paula was only four years old, Teresa was six, Penny three. Herein are Paula's memories of their years in foster care, moving with her sisters from family to family until their 1974 placement with Bub and Hilde at Lindbergh Acres, a rundown ranch where they lived for almost 11 years. Earlier foster families ranged from the bizarre to the abusive. The Spinozas had a seven-year-old son who ran through the house clad only in a makeshift superhero cape. Mrs. Clapp was addicted to purple, and Mr. Clapp made sexual overtures to Paula and perhaps to her sisters as well; they never talked about it. The Fredricksons bought them bicycles and had family meetings and seemed to actually love them, but sent them away after only a few months. At their last placement, Hilde set rules that no one could fathom, occasionally beat them, and sometimes hid their clothes, but Bub was fun-loving and affectionate, and they were provided with food, clothing, toys, and their own horses. Several chapters are devoted to the sisters' adolescence, no more or less tumultuous than most, although given an extra edge by Hilde's increasingly unstable behavior and the ever-present threat of being moved to yet another foster home. Throughout it all, the sisters remained together, an extraordinary achievement in the annals of foster care. They were living together and attending college when their mother finally resurfaced in 1986 to establish a tentative relationship the author admits still baffles her today. Not a foster-care horror story exactly, but a thoughtful recalling of the emotional toll a life of uncertainty can take. Agent: Leigh Feldman/Darhanshoff & Verrill
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