The Meaning of Children [Kindle Edition]

Beverly Akerman (Author)

Book Description

Award winning short story collection that captures pivotal moments—of childhood, adolescence, parenthood, and beyond--in the under-appreciated world of women. Disparate decades, genders, and narrative voices woven together by themes of sex, death, guilt, social prejudice.

And love, always love.

A girl discovers a fear of heights as her parents’ marriage unravels; a thirty-something venture fund manager frets over his daughter’s paternity; an orphan whose hands kill whatever they touch is accused of homophobia; a suicidal daycare worker has a very bad day; a mother of two can only bear to consider abortion in the second person; the wife of a retirement-aged professor finds him unconscious near his computer. The 14 stories of The Meaning Of Children speak to all who—though aware the world can be a very dark place—can’t help but long for redemption.

Winner of the David Adams Richards Prize; Top 10 List of the CBC – Scotiabank Giller Prize Readers’ Choice Contest, and many others.

A keen, incisive vision into the hidden world of children as well as intimate knowledge of the secret spaces that exist between the everyday events of life. A work with a brilliant sense of story…Magical, and so refreshing for me to read. I absolutely loved it and I hope it goes on to do marvelous things. Yours is a luminous talent.
~JoAnne Soper-Cook, Author and Judge, 2010 David Adams Richards Prize

Loved your book; read it in one sitting. Each [story] is either told by a child, or about a child. And it’s interesting because I think depending on the age of the person reading it, you relate to different ones. But especially to feminists, growing up with it, wrestling with our beliefs, and whether it worked out or not… a lot of women in this book are trapped. We were trapped by what we were brought up to believe. And then we’re trapped by the marriages we find ourselves in, and the children we have…But on the other hand, each story ends with a certain resolve. There’s that sense of okay this is my situation, but. And that’s what the meaning of children is. It’s about hope. It’s about the future.
~Mutsumi Takahashi, Anchor, CTV News Montreal

A collection of 14 short stories which covers the range of experience from the point of view of children, mums, and also aging parents as well. It’s all there in this lovely little book, short stories about life in a family that might just resemble yours. I wanted to congratulate you on the publication of this book and I hope it goes far far afield for you. A wonderful gift for mother’s day, perhaps more long lived than the usual cut flowers.
~Anne Lagacé Dowson, CJAD Radio journalist

This isn’t the invented childhood of imagination and wonderment…[here] children both corrupt and redeem: each other, family relationships and the female body.
~Katie Hewitt, The Globe & Mail http://bit.ly/ex4zD8

Akerman holds up our greatest fears, not to dwell on them, but to marvel at our commitment to life, especially to passing it on to others.
~Anne Chudobiak, The Montreal Gazette, Edmonton Journal, and Regina Leader Post

Haunting and powerfully emotive, drawing on the subtleties of childhood, youth and parenthood that undermine us in strange and unexpected ways. Your writing is polished and mature, something I am always in awe of and why I got into publishing to begin with.
~Meghan Macdonald, Transatlantic Literary Agency

Counter-intuitive to the title, for me these stories resonate with the sad truth of being a grownup. Life is that damn hard and just-under-the-surface tension saturates our existence. But the kids, they know what's going on...Akerman nails that sorrow, highlights it with unexpected humour, credits our resilience and almost never skips a beat.
~Chris Benjamin, Author of Drive-by Saviours, on Goodreads (4 stars)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A luminous talent...A keen, incisive vision into the hidden world of children as well as intimate knowledge of the secret spaces that exist between the everyday events of life. A work with a brilliant sense of story."
~JoAnne Soper-Cook, Judge, 2010 David Adams Richards Prize

"Profound...a writer of  such substance that she is obviously headed to the top echelon  of writers of our time...a book of rare sensitivity and masterful creative writing [that] must surely be shared with as many friends and fellow readers as possible."
~Grady Harp, Amazon.com Hall of Fame Reviewer, ***** (5 stars)

"I can't stop thinking about this book...I can't remember a book, let alone a collection of short stories, where I could identify so heavily with the emotions and feelings of the characters."
~Martin Crosbie, author of My Temporary Life, ***** (5 stars)

"Remarkable in its intensity and craft, The Meaning of Children is a book that bears discovering, and Akerman a writer to watch."
~ Samuel Peralta, poet, author of Sonata Vampirica and other books, ***** (5 stars)

"This isn't the invented childhood of imagination and wonderment...[here] children both corrupt and redeem: each other, family relationships and the female body."
~Katie Hewitt, The Globe & Mail

"Loved your book; read it in one sitting."
~Mutsumi Takahashi, Anchor, CTV News Montreal

"...this lovely little book, short stories about life in a family that might just resemble yours...A wonderful gift for mother's day, perhaps more long lived than the usual cut flowers."
~Anne Lagacé Dowson, CJAD Radio

From the Author

Captures pivotal moments in the under-appreciated world of girls & women. Childhood, adolescence, parenthood, or life as a whole, disparate decades and narrative voices braided together by themes of sex, death, and social prejudice.

And love, always love...a girl discovers a fear of heights as her parents' marriage unravels; a thirty-something venture fund manager frets over his daughter's paternity; an orphan whose hands kill whatever they touch is accused of homophobia; a mother of two can only bear to consider abortion in the second person; the wife of a retirement-aged professor finds him unconscious near his computer...The Meaning Of Children speaks to all who--though aware the world can be a very dark place--can't help but long for redemption.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• File Size: 375 KB
• Print Length: 230 pages
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B007H067R6
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #397,496 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars I can't stop thinking about this book May 2, 2012

By Martin Crosbie

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

It's been over a week since I read this collection of short stories and the characters are still with me.
These are stories about real people, real children, teenagers, adults, in real times. I went through a whole range of emotions when I read them, some good, some not so good. When the child was sitting on the stairs listening to her parents, I was right there with her. When the adult was sitting by the lake contemplating what happened years before and looking at her present day life, I was sitting across from her, doing the same thing. I can't remember a book, let alone a collection of short stories, where I could identify so heavily with the emotions and feelings of the characters.
As far as I'm concerned, this is what good writing, and a good book, should do for you. Yes, it entertained for sure, but it made me think and remember.

If you enjoy quality writing and a book that will make you think about where you've been and where you're going read The Meaning Of Children.
Highly recommended.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A life-altering read is so rare for a writer ... May 25, 2012

By Michelle Greysen / Professional Freelance Writer

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

I reviewed this title on my Blog a while back and as you will read it has altered my own thoughts on childhood recollections. Thrilled to not only own a personally signed copy but to now have an iPad version to re-read these haunting stories. Not only for people with children, but for anyone who was ever a child.

Some excerpts from my blog review pasted here (to read more visit my web site and blog):

"... A life-altering read is so rare for me, and I imagine for many writers, with a critical eye often hard to keep closed while hoping to get caught up and swept away while reading fiction for pleasure ... This collection of short stories is her debut into the fiction book world after a solid career in molecular genetics research. Her stories are as diverse as her changing career path and yet string together a theme as connected as a genetic chain.

Very few times in my life resonate so strongly to a past and a childhood that has me always facing forward and rarely wanting to look back. As I read Akerman's book instantly I am that child on the first page, in the first sentence, whose parents "When the arguing started would get louder and louder, till they broke into my dreams." As the stories moved along I, like her character, realized how much I learned from eavesdropping during the arguments, and sadly like the child I too knew "... where the patched holes were in the walls" and that "... it would be smarter to keep my opinions to myself." In the next few tales the loneliness hit home of a child walking along to school wishing for her own puppy and that she could write a book and feeling very misunderstood by grown-ups. The stories continued to remind me of the confusion of growing up and not knowing, as the author puts it, how to ask the questions that needed answers.
The middle year stories remind the reader of the challenges and fears of raising our children, the uncertainty of it all, the fragility of life, and the strength or disappointment in our partnership deals we make and break which we had hoped would have carried us up through it all. Heartache over loss, the loss of youth, loss of freedom, the loss of some piece of our very being and mostly the vulnerability of childhood and how it plagues on the greater vulnerability of a marriage.
As the book makes it to the end years we are taken into that empty space children leave behind as the writer reminds us about "... those reasonable accommodations that permitted long-term marriages to endure." There is a questioning of failures that comes with age and sometimes a loneliness stashed deep below the lies people told themselves necessary as if "... sleep-walking through life, anesthetized."
Children weave their way through every tale, conceived in honor or shame, lost and found and lost again, passed on, passed over, and always sparking the reader to question where in all these stories sits their own story. I found a small part of my own child- like self in every tale but mostly I felt compelled to alter the stark realities of Akerman's haunting characters, too late to alter my own."

Thanks Beverly for a great read!

Michelle Greysen
Professional Freelance Writer

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Akerman takes you back April 18, 2012

By twalker

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Akerman takes you back to the time you were a child. No matter you did not grow up in Montreal or Jewish, the situations, conflicts, joys and fears are universal. Akerman grounds emotions with rich descriptions and a strong sense of place.

More About the Author

Just in: The Meaning of Children co-winner of the 2012 J.I. Segal Jewish Book Award!

"Beverly Akerman's collection of stories The Meaning of Children manages to capture with both wit and wisdom the effervescence, the indignities, the curiosity, and the fear that are part of a child's eye view of the world. This book is teeming with wit and quality observation." ~ J.I. Segal Award Committee for the Mona Elaine Adilman Prize for English Fiction and Poetry on a Jewish theme, Nov. 14, 2012

After over two decades in molecular genetics research, Beverly Akerman realized she'd been learning more and more about less and less. Skittish at the prospect of knowing everything about nothing, she turned, for solace, to writing. Her story collection The Meaning of Children was released in 2011 by Exile Editions. Winner of the David Adams Richards Prize, a CBC-Scotiabank Giller Prize Readers' Choice Contest Top 10, honourable mention in General Fiction for the Eric Hoffer Prize, and many others.

The Globe & Mail said, "This isn't the invented childhood of imagination and wonderment...[here] children both corrupt and redeem: each other, family relationships and the female body." Other recent honours: shortlisted for Aesthetica Magazine's Creative Works Competition, winner of PWAC's 2011 Short Article Award, Pushcart Prize nominations in fiction and nonfiction. Credits include The Globe & Mail, The Hill Times, The Jewish Magazine, Maclean's, The Montreal Gazette, The National Post, The National Review of Medicine, The Toronto Star, CBC Radio One, myriad literary and scientific journals and other publications. She's strangely pleased to believe she's the only Canadian writer to have sequenced her own DNA.

See "How to become an e-book sensation. Seriously" at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/how-to-become-an-e-book-sensation-seriously/article4103854/.

More Beverly at:

Beverly's Blog: http://beverlyakerman.blogspot.com/
Beverly's Facebook pages: http://www.facebook.com/TheMeaningofChildren and http://www.facebook.com/beverly.akerman
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/Beverly_Akerman


TV & Radio Interviews: http://bit.ly/nJpCHj; http://bit.ly/reqcN3; http://bit.ly/pOGFc9

Reader and Reviewer Response to Beverly Akerman's The Meaning Of Children:


A keen, incisive vision into the hidden world of children as well as intimate knowledge of the secret spaces that exist between the everyday events of life. A work with a brilliant sense of story...Magical, and so refreshing for me to read. I absolutely loved it and I hope it goes on to do marvellous things. Yours is a luminous talent.

~JoAnne Soper-Cook, Author and Judge, the WFNB's 2010 David Adams Richards Prize



Loved your book... read it in one sitting.

~Mutsumi Takahashi, Anchor, CTV News Montreal; Interview


This isn't the invented childhood of imagination and wonderment...[here] children both corrupt and redeem: each other, family relationships and the female body.

~Katie Hewitt, The Globe & Mail



Akerman holds up our greatest fears, not to dwell on them, but to marvel at our commitment to life, especially to passing it on to others.

~Anne Chudobiak, The Montreal Gazette, Edmonton Journal, and Regina Leader Post

Counter-intuitive to the title, for me these stories resonate with the sad truth of being a grownup. Life is that damn hard and just-under-the-surface tension saturates our existence. But the kids, they know what's going on. They may not understand all the details but they know the score. Akerman nails that sorrow, highlights it with unexpected humour, credits our resilience and almost never skips a beat. As with any collection of stories, some are stronger than others. Lighter Than Air, The Mysteries, and Broken knocked the wind out of me, forcing me to take a long pause and mull them over, sit a while.

~Chris Benjamin, Author of Drive-by Saviours, on Goodreads



Your book The Meaning of Children is great and so are you!

~Anne Lagacé Dowson, CJAD Radio journalist, on Twitter; Interview



Akerman engages with dichotomies. Childhood is that safe, magical, carefree time and place -- but it's also risky, threatening, ominous and dangerous -- full of impenetrable mystery around things seen and experienced, but beyond understanding. And if it's not too much of a simplification or stating the obvious, life and the world are not gentle on children simply for being children...If, as Dostoevsky once remarked, and as is quoted on the collection's frontispiece, "The soul is healed by being with children," it is the tragedy of adulthood that we become so isolated from childhood -- and what children offer us. Artfully, evocatively, Beverly Akerman's The Meaning of Children reminds us of that.

~Darrell Squires, The Western Star


Beverly's background as a scientist, MSc and twenty years as a molecular researcher, inevitably spills into the stories...characters, the settings and her style. Intelligent, objective, open-minded but not clinical, her prose is refreshing and unprejudiced. Her characters are frank and genuine...With The Meaning of Children, we get a beautifully written exposé on the meaning of life.

~Francine Diot-Layton, The Rover



Your book is filled with insight and wisdom and gorgeous moving stories...You are dazzling. (I had read "Pie" long ago. It is just as moving the second time).

~Hal Ackerman (no relation), UCLA Screenwriting Area Co-Chair and author of Stein Stoned and Stein Stung



All I seem to read these days are parenting books. But I think I might be learning more about being a parent from Beverly Akerman's The Meaning of Children than from anywhere else. I can't put it down.

~Jenn Hardy, Writer, Editor and Blogger at http://mamanaturale.ca



I adore your knack for leaving questions hanging in the reader's mind...and then there are those thought provoking zingers tucked neatly inside the last thought, description or action of your narrators. I haven't enjoyed short stories like this since Margaret Atwood, Barbara Gowdy and Alice Munro.

~Rusti Lehay, Writer and Editor



Beverly Akerman is what Alice Munro was supposed to be.

~Mike Rose (received by my publisher, via email)



A life-altering read is so rare for me, and I imagine for many writers, with a critical eye often hard to keep closed while hoping to get caught up and swept away while reading fiction for pleasure...Her stories are as diverse as her changing career path and yet string together a theme as connected as a genetic chain...Children weave their way through every tale...always sparking the reader to question where in all these stories sits their own story.

~Michelle Greysen, Writer, Editor, and Blogger



[You show us how] our childhood experiences affect us forever. And what we bury comes to the surface from time to time....The story about the woman who couldn't touch anything without it dying was sad and funny - loved the boys next door - and I liked PIE - as you have now given me a simple recipe that I can remember for pie crust -I am a baker. And the poor woman who had entered probably menopause and her marriage had broken without her noticing it. She was just so angry and exhausted. So many women I feel are and hide it.

~Carlene Orefici, a Facebook friend I haven't met in real life (yet!)



Just finished "Like Jeremy Irons." That was a tough one. Saying I loved it feels contrary to the agony I'm feeling right now. (Perhaps I shouldn't have settled into it with a glass of wine?) Awesome writing - even if my uterus is cramping!

~Lisa Dalrymple, Winner of The Writers Union of Canada's 2011 Writing for Children Competition



I enjoyed The Meaning of Children so much that I wished there were twice as many stories! If I had to pick one, "Pour Un Instant" was my favourite. I was sad to come to the end of the book.

~Lisa De Nikolits, Author of The Hungry Mirror, on Amazon.ca



@Beverly_Akerman I am devouring your fabulous book The Meaning of Children!

~Alison Palkhivala, Writer and Editor, on Twitter



This morning I wrote to a friend in Victoria. I told her: 'I finished Beverly Akerman's book and really liked it. The theme throughout is children: being a child, being pregnant, abortion, losing a child, being a father, giving a child for adoption. Touchy stuff but she has such kindness, such compassion and infuses hope and love in the saddest situation. She offers unique and surprising insights, it's never sappy or cliché. All this within the short story frame, quite a feat in my opinion. If you can't find her book, I'll send you my copy.' Thank you for writing such an amazing book and for promoting yourself at the gym. It was a bold and creative move. I would have not known about your writing otherwise.

~Diane Des Roches, new gym friend and budding writer