What will make this book of great interest to anyone facing problems and challenges in child rearing is Ms. Childs’ honesty and steadfast love for her boys. She has also taken some long, hard looks at herself and her parenting style, briefly sharing her hard-earned self-knowledge.
It is this self-knowledge that will perhaps be of most value to parents of other puzzling children. Learning to let go of old patterns of behavior — not of the child’s behavior, but of the parents’ reaction to it — will, as Ms. Childs so wisely puts it, mean giving up “what does not work.”
Tolstoy once said that all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is different — a facile statement from another era. This book shows clearly that even happy families may have deeply unhappy times, and that although family dynamics wax and wane and wobble at times, there is always hope as long as all involved are willing to take small, determined steps, counting on the family’s deep love to prevail.
©2012 by Julia Sneden
BIRDS OF A LESSER PARADISE
by Megan Mayhew Bergman, © 2012
Published by Scribner (div. Simon & Schuster); Hardcover, 224 pp
Anyone who came of age in the pre-computer part of the twentieth century is probably familiar with the power that a short story, that little gem of a literary genre, can hold over its reader. Magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, The Atlantic Monthly, Saturday Review of Literature, The New Yorker or Esquire regularly carried stories from writers like O. Henry, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Mansfield, Eudora Welty, Ernest Hemmingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. There were often reprints and translations from authors of an earlier time, writers like Gogol, Poe, or Chekhov. The short story, complete unto itself and succinct enough to fit into life’s busy schedules, was an art form that supported many a fine writer.
With the advent of multi-channel television and the dandy distractions offered by our computers, good short stories, while not completely off the radar, have fallen prey to modern times, and have become harder to find. Anyone who admires the genre, however, can still find plenty of publications that publish short fiction. Just go to Google and give it a try.
However, you really don’t need to fish around. Try Megan Bergman’s new collection, titled Birds of a Lesser Paradise if you want a shot of the real thing. This book introduces a fine, fine writer whose stories count as capital-L Literature, and are an absolutely wonderful read.
Bergman is a native North Carolinian, now living in Vermont with her veterinarian husband. Her stories have been published in anthologies and journals, but this is her first book-length collection.
And a marvelous collection it is. She writes from a deep connection to the natural world, and to her place in it. She manages to express the absurdities that life often hands to us, and the self-made absurdities that we often hand to ourselves. Her stories have both moral profundity and light-hearted humor.
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