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Bastards : a memoir / Mary Anna King.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Crows Nest, NSW : Pier 9, 2015Edition: First editionDescription: vi, 248 pages : portrait ; 24 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9781743362266 (paperback)
Other title:
  • Bastards : the remarkable true story of seven siblings who found each other as adults
Subject(s): Genre/Form:
Contents:
Prologue -- Part One. Jersey -- The day the music died -- Marigold Court -- Scars -- The secondhand washing machine -- Bringing Becky back -- Leaving Jersey -- Part Two. Oklahoma -- Reflections -- Telling stories -- Discipline -- Things you can tell just by looking -- The debt -- Wake up -- Part Three. Found -- Hammered -- Like a hole in my head -- Good daughter -- Rebekah two -- Join the club -- Quarter-life crisis -- Requiem -- Meeting Lesley.
Scope and content: "'A stirring, vividly told story of a young woman's quest to find the family she lost...an impressive debut'-Peter Balakian; Born into poverty in southern New Jersey and raised in a commune of single mothers, Mary Anna King watched her mother give away one of her newborn sisters every year to another family. All told, there were seven children: Mary, her older brother, and five phantom sisters. Then one day, Mary was sent away, too. Living in Oklahoma with her maternal grandfather, Mary gets a new name and a new life. But she's haunted by the past: by the baby girls she's sure will come looking for her someday, by the mother she had to leave behind, by the father who left her. Mary is a college student when her sisters start to get back in touch. With each reunion, her family becomes closer to whole again. Moving, haunting, and at times wickedly funny, Bastards is about finding one's family and oneself"--Provided by publisher.
Holdings
Item type Current library Collection Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Biographies Davis (Central) Library Biographies Biographies B KIN 1 Available T00588218
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This is the true story of what happens when seven biological siblings who were adopted by five different families as children are reunited as adults.

Prologue -- Part One. Jersey -- The day the music died -- Marigold Court -- Scars -- The secondhand washing machine -- Bringing Becky back -- Leaving Jersey -- Part Two. Oklahoma -- Reflections -- Telling stories -- Discipline -- Things you can tell just by looking -- The debt -- Wake up -- Part Three. Found -- Hammered -- Like a hole in my head -- Good daughter -- Rebekah two -- Join the club -- Quarter-life crisis -- Requiem -- Meeting Lesley.

"'A stirring, vividly told story of a young woman's quest to find the family she lost...an impressive debut'-Peter Balakian; Born into poverty in southern New Jersey and raised in a commune of single mothers, Mary Anna King watched her mother give away one of her newborn sisters every year to another family. All told, there were seven children: Mary, her older brother, and five phantom sisters. Then one day, Mary was sent away, too. Living in Oklahoma with her maternal grandfather, Mary gets a new name and a new life. But she's haunted by the past: by the baby girls she's sure will come looking for her someday, by the mother she had to leave behind, by the father who left her. Mary is a college student when her sisters start to get back in touch. With each reunion, her family becomes closer to whole again. Moving, haunting, and at times wickedly funny, Bastards is about finding one's family and oneself"--Provided by publisher.

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Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Hall was born in Camden, NJ, to parents who got along sporadically and long enough to produce many children. The family's circumstances of poverty and dysfunction ultimately lead Mary to move to Oklahoma, where she was adopted and raised by her maternal grandfather and his wife, a strict disciplinarian named Mimi, who also have custody of another of Mary's sisters. Other siblings were given up to other families. Despite these disruptions, Mary does well enough in school to get into college, but her constant romanticizing of her family life and longing to reunite with her lost siblings hold her back. Ultimately, she embarks on several emotional and marginally satisfying reunions with her now-adult brothers and sisters. The audio production and performance are solid; narrator Christina Delaine does a fine job of being emotive and distinguishing among the many characters. VERDICT Readers who enjoy melancholy family memoirs or fiction by Jojo Moyes, Celeste Ng, and similar authors might enjoy this title, which may also strike a chord with adoptees and individuals from broken families.-Nicole A. Cooke, Univ. of Illinois, Champaign © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

King's goodhearted mother had seven children, but she gave them up; she just couldn't afford to keep them. King's dad was somewhat shiftless, and he finally shifted to drugs, God, and music before stepping out of family life. In Oklahoma, Granddad and Mimi took three of the youngsters; King remained with them, and they adopted her and provided for her, but this memoir sets forth the feelings of loss, loneliness, and alienation King had as she grew up, sometimes seeing her parents, sometimes reuniting with a familiar sibling, eventually meeting and befriending the siblings given away as babies. Her story is engrossing and unsettling; she spares little in her retelling. Who is she, she wonders, and what would it be like to have had a real family? She seeks no pity, though she does earn respect as a fine writer and thinker. Adoptees and others missing what they might have had or been will admire her endurance, her ability to cope (sometimes aided by alcohol), and the ultimate fact that she made it, despite everything, because of everything.--Kinney, Eloise Copyright 2015 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

A young woman's account of how a dysfunctional family situation caused her to become separated from her six siblings but how all seven still managed to reconnect.New Jersey native King was the second-oldest child of working-class parents "whose passions burned like an incinerator and swung wildly from love to hate and back again." By the time her fourth sibling was born, her father began actively disappearing. Strapped for cash, the author's mother put her third child, Becky Jo, in the care of her parents in Oklahoma. From that moment on, life in the King household followed a predictable pattern: the father would return temporarily, then leave his wife pregnant with another child who would get adopted as soon as it was born. When King's parents finally divorced, they decided to send both King and her elder brother to join Becky Jo in Oklahoma. A Yankee girl in a place where it seemed the natives thought "the Civil War [was] still going on," King graduallythough uneasilysettled into the life thrust upon her. She eventually accepted a name change and became the family golden child. Yet she never forgot the brother whom her grandfather, in a fit of rage, sent back to New Jersey for misbehavior, nor could she forget about the siblings she had never met. King returned to New York for college, preparing for the day she would meet the siblings she knew would come looking for her. She desired to be "a person worth finding, worth keeping." As King made peace with her parents, each of the children, all girls, who had been adopted found her. Working together, the author and her siblings then began the difficult task of reclaiming the familial ties that had been denied them. King not only explores the impact of disrupted relationships; she also eloquently probes the meaning of both love and human connectedness. A poignant memoir that thoughtfully examines a set of difficult and unique family relationships. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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