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“The unblinking look of one child at a hard world. Written gloriously and movingly.”
— Frank McCourt, #1 New York Times bestseller
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“This is one of those rare books that captures both the innocence of the child narrator and the wisdom of the adult author. Beautifully written, utterly convincing, alternately heartbreaking and inspiring, Blackbird is both a tribute to the author's mother and to her own powers of survival. I was so caught up in Jennifer Lauck's story I couldn't turn the pages fast enough, yet I didn't want it to end.”
— Hope Edelman, New York Times bestselling author
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“[Jennifer] has constructed a riveting narrative from the awful mess of her life. That she has managed to do so fills me with an admiration for which I cannot find words. The best I can do is to suggest that you read this book.”
— Times (London)
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“Jennifer Lauck has been to hell and back. The Portland, Oregon, author, a former TV journalist, is now the happily married mother of a three-year-old son. But her memoir, Blackbird, tells of the death of her adored mother when she was seven, and of an unraveling childhood that at one point left her abandoned in a Los Angeles slum. ‘I had lived my life pretty much pushing these memories away,’ says Lauck, 36. Then she started to search for the facts of her early life—and to mine her own painful memories. The result is a standout debut in the crowded memoir genre.”
— Newsweek
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“Jenny, experiencing the death of her parents…was forced into a religious cult and abused, all before junior high school, where this Dickensian orphan’s memoir ends. Hang on to that cliff: Lauck’s finishing a sequel that’s likely to be just as remarkable.”
— Talk magazine
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“Even as a child, Jennifer Lauck knew her life was unusually complicated, which is perhaps why she has chosen to narrate her memoir, Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found, from the perspective of the precocious child she was. It’s a choice that allows her recounting of grim, life-shattering events a stern ingeniousness that…the result is a novelistic vision of a life with both hope and heartache to spare.”
— Bazaar
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“If this were fiction, readers would find its chain of tragedies and surreal cruelties impossibly melodramatic but this riveting tale of a young girl so burdened with family trauma that she thinks, ‘I know nothing about being a kid,’ is a true story…and, indeed, she had to grapple with more of life’s miseries before puberty that most people face in a lifetime, a brutal coming of age she documents with remarkable lucidity and forgiveness.”
— Booklist
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“There are no words to describe all of my feelings about this very special book. It is poignant, beautifully crafted—a tribute to a gifted writer and the author’s incredible spirit. I was struck by the fact that there was so little laughter in her life, yet she clung to the words of her mother and father who continued to give her strength.”
— Book Sense
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“A searing, soaring memoir of one girl's complicated and almost unbelievable childhood…Lauck's literary achievements—voice, characterization, pacing—are as extraordinary as those of Frank McCourt and Dave Eggers, if not more so. A lost childhood reclaimed in profound triumph, and with the promise of a sequel to match.”
— Kirkus Reviews