Book Review: The Doll by Ismail Kadare

By Linda Romano Many people may  not be familiar with Albania, a small country bordering Greece on the western part of the Balkan Peninsula, or of Ismail Kadare, a renowned Albanian poet and novelist. In Kadare’s autobiographical novel, The Doll, this lack of familiarity does not prevent us from identifying with the common question of how our childhood, and especially our mothers, impact our life. At seventy-eight, Ismail Kadare explores the relationship with his mother and her influence on the political writer he became. Kadare not only survived but flourished in a country under communist dictator Enver Hoxha, where writers…

Book Review: Out of the Pantry

by Linda Romano In her memoir, Out of the Pantry[1], Ronni Robinson confronts how a childhood eating pleasure turned into a full out “compulsive eating disorder.”  As a latch-key child, Robinson found solace in biking home hurriedly from school to indulge in whatever variety of cookies her mother had tucked away in the kitchen drawer with a tall glass of cold milk. With an older brother at home, who mostly ignored her, she sat alone at the table, dipping cookie after cookie, “like a robot, losing all sense of what was going on around me … the shimmer of happiness seemed…

Book Review: Notes on a Silencing

Lacy Crawford’s memoir Notes on a Silencing speaks to the ways gender, privilege, and power silenced Crawford twenty-five years ago. When Crawford was fifteen years old, she was lured to a boys’ dormitory one night, pulled from beneath the night shadows, and sexually assaulted.