From Publishers Weekly
In 1968, when Carswell was seven, her father became the executive director of the Albany (N.Y.) Home for Children, formerly known as the Albany Orphan Asylum. The family's backyard abutted the Home's playground, but Carswell and her siblings were forbidden to fraternize with the client children. From that fact, Carswell has spun a thin memoir of her life's "dramatic ups and downs." Ostensibly, the book celebrates Carswell's mother and includes a brief account of artist Bob Wygant, a quasi-orphan at the asylum before and during WWII, but both of these characters are given short shift in favor of the author herself, whose every childish mood and haircut is exhaustively chronicled. Disconcertingly, this is presented largely in age-appropriate prose: "I am nervous. I don't see them. My heart goes thump-thump. It thump-thumps fast"; readers will tire of chapter after chapter of Carswell's self-absorbed childhood reveries (she glosses more quickly over her adolescent and adult life). Though Carswell seems obsessed with orphans, she doesn't include much information on the Home, her mother's life or that of Wygant, whose life isn't relevant to her own or anyone else's, beyond the fact of his former residence at the Home. For most readers, the memoir will seem pointless, though writing it presumably helped the author deal with some emotional childhood issues.
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From Booklist
Symptoms of cross-genre abuse crop up even in nonfiction, and this depression memoir/family history/local history is a perfect example. Carswell, a magazine editor and writer, spins the story of her own growing up, the child of an administrator of the Albany (NY) Home for Children. It's the story of what it felt like, watching the orphans across her backyard from the relative safety of her own home. It's the story of some of those orphans grown up, some who made lives and some who didn't make it. It's the story of her gentle and utterly beloved mother, her mother's dying, and the writer's episodes of depression and OCD. Carswell constructs all of this in a carefully woven narrative, although it sinks into bathos and mawkishness as often as it rises to limn a searing memory or tie a loose emotional end off neatly. Quotes from orphaned writers (so many of them!) provide echo and counterpoint to each chapter.
GraceAnne DeCandidoCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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