Like Family Pdf Summary Reviews By Paula McLain

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Like Family Pdf Summary

The first book by the author of the New York Times bestseller The Paris Wife is a powerful and haunting memoir of the years she and her two sisters spent as foster children. In the early 70s, after being abandoned by both parents, the girls were made wards of the Fresno County, California court and spent the next 14 years-in a series of adoptive homes. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the most compelling memoirs in recent years–a book the tradition of Jo Ann Beard’s Boys of My Youth and Mary Karr’sThe Liar’s Club.

McLain’s beautiful writing and limber voice capture the intense loneliness, sadness, and determination of a young girl both on her own and responsible, with her siblings, for staying together as a family.

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Like Family Review

Dale Arenson

5.0 out of 5 stars A great literary voice.
Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2022

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I’m currently on my third Paula Mclain book and am definitely a fan.
Reading about a little girl’s childhood is not my normal fare, but I still found it riveting.
Perhaps it was the similarities of our stories.
I don’t think I have ever read anyone describe people and places, sights and sounds, or especially emotions so colorfully and poetically.
As an author myself, I am totally jealous of her skill with the written word.

a reader

3.0 out of 5 stars Great Childhood Reminiscences, but Doesn’t Really Come Together
Reviewed in the United States on March 26, 2015

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I loved the first 80 or so pages of this memoir, and I hope I’m not doing it a disservice by only assigning 3 (really 3 and a half!) stars. It is well-written and rich in detail about a Fresno childhood in the 1970s and 80s. But the subtitle, Growing Up in Other People’s Houses, leads you to believe that the foster-care journey will continue throughout the author’s childhood — or at least, throughout the book! In fact, it’s over for her by age 8, when she and her sisters find a family that raises them to adulthood. And although McLain is superb at recalling her feelings and attitudes as a child, she never really tackles the larger questions about her final foster family, as well as about her birth mother.

The first few chapters describe the three sisters’ rocky and rapid progress through a series of unsatisfactory foster homes, following the separate disappearances of their mother and father when the oldest of the three children is just 4 or 5. The pain and loneliness and sheer embarrassment of walking into a new house with new rules and a new dynamic are beautifully described by McLain. The three sisters’ closeness and their very limited understanding of what is happening (they must leave one idyllic home because, they are told, their foster parents have to move for work, but later the girls realize that they haven’t moved at all, and never learn what happened) are evoked perfectly by McLain.

But once the girls find their final placement, with an offbeat couple who buy the girls horses, take them on trips, and generally act like parents (or so it seems to the reader), McLain is less successful at describing why she and her sisters never really feel at home. The foster mother is a rather remote German woman, but the father is a very involved, fun parent who is always launching new projects and schemes. As the girls grow, we learn a lot about their typically tumultuous adolescent years, but we never get why things are so bad with the foster parents that McLain leaves at 19 and never sees them again, not even returning when they are dying. Yet this seems the very heart of the problem of foster care: the inability to bond, after being shunted around too much. And it would seem to be exactly what McLain is trying to communicate in this memoir.

The other issue is her relationship with her birth mother, who returns after the children are out of high school and just beginning life on their own. Predictably, they all reunite to try to make a life together. But we don’t really know, behind anecdotal incidents, what that relationship turned out to be. The final pages describe each of the sisters’ relationship with her mother as McLain sees it, but we’re never shown it, so it doesn’t feel real to us.

I enjoyed this book tremendously and think it needed to be written, but I wish the second half had been as illuminating and detailed as the first.

About Paula McLain Author Of Like Family pdf Book

Paula McLain Author Of Like Family pdf Book, She is the New York Times and internationally bestselling novels, The Paris Wife, Circling the Sun and Love and Ruin. Now she introduces When the Stars Go Dark (April 13, 2021), an atmospheric novel of intertwined destinies and heart-wrenching suspense. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan in 1996, and is also the author of two collections of poetry, the memoir Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses, and the debut novel, A Ticket to Ride. Her work has has appeared in The New York Times, Real Simple, Town & Country, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Good Housekeeping, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Cleveland, Ohio.