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The Amazon Store at MillionDollarPetPix.com ( In association with Amazon.com )Without a Map: A Memoir - too much mapAlthough this book started with quite a jump and kept me interested, by the middle I was getting too much redundancy. I'm glad this author told her story and shared it as a tool for relationships and to learn from. Rating: - Possibly exaggeratedI really enjoyed reading this book but have wondered if the author has exaggerated a bit for effect. I lived in a small New Hampshire town close to Hampton at the time the book begins. A girl or two in the town became pregnant and there was definite disapproval, but at the same time kindness. No one was shunned by her friends or anyone else, much less her parents. I find it hard to believe that her parents were so stonily unloving at this critical time of need for support and understanding, not to mention help. Maybe, but I doubt it. Her travels sound suspiciously overdone also. Still, it's an absorbing story and a gripping read. Rating:  - An unforgettable memoirThis is the harrowing tale of a child who was betrayed by her mother and father, and a child who became a mother and then betrayed her own child. The story begins with the sudden loss of everything that Meredith Hall held dear--her parents' love, her home, her place in the community, her school friends--when she was deserted for the sin of becoming pregnant at 16. The memoir is a sustained reflection on how this betrayal played itself out through the rest of her life. Throughout the book, Hall tries to understand the terrible betrayal of her parents' love, a love bordered by conditions, the most important one being "Thou shalt not bring shame upon us." With startling honesty, she consistently refuses to gloss over, deny, or ignore the consequences of her actions or those of her parents, most notably in her account of the abuses her abandoned son, Paul, suffered at the hands of his adoptive father. Hall never hides from the scars she inflicted on her beloved son, and insists on forcing herself to note the terrible differences between the upbringings her 3 sons experienced--the first child a life of deprivation and fear, the others, lives of love and comfort. There is no possibility of reconciling these facts, nor does she attempt to. Hall holds all the violent and conflicting emotions together, never allowing the one to cancel out the other--love and rage, trust and betrayal, need and abandonment, loss and guilt. Her writing carries no contradictions, just the paradoxes of a life lived and declared in lines of lyrical beauty, with passages of exquisite beauty, so finely detailed that it hurts to read. It is a testament to Hall's many years of deep reflection and personal honesty that she could sustain this juxtaposing and balancing of opposites without allowing her work to collapse under the weight of the awful emotional overload she has lived through. Although this memoir makes for compelling reading, it is not always an easy read. To read it is to become immersed in the terrible suffering of an untethered soul seeking love lost. Hall partially finds what she has spent a lifetime looking for when she is reunited with her 21-year-old son, and when she opens her home and gradually her heart to an old man who is afraid to continue living alone after the death of his wife. But in the end this is a book about life and living. Hall succeeds in gleaning wisdom from a grief begun in a betrayal and carried in a wounded heart through her life. She discovers a joy that "lies like a shimmering pond within our grief, the landscape of our lives." In the end, Hall asks herself if she would choose a different life, if she would forget all the pain. And the answer she gives is surely the only answer possible. "No. Memory remains. The uneasy remembering transforms pain into sorrow, and sorrow into love. There can be no oblivion." by Edith O'Nuallain for Story Circle Book Reviews reviewing books by, for, and about women Rating: - Too redundant, too many feelingsWhile Meredith Hall in "Without a Map" tells a sad, interesting story, I found myself struggling to get through the book. Undoubtedly, she was treated abysmally by her parents and friends when she became pregnant at 16 years old. This family and community "shunning," along with giving up her baby for adoption, stays with her through the course of her life. Very sad, poignant stuff. But, she reminds us, practically every paragraph, over and over, that she is in pain, sad, alone, detached, etc. There are very interesting, meaty parts of the story. She buys a fishing boat with a boyfriend and fishes through a storm, she walks through Europe to the Middle East with no money, she cares for her mother through a terrible terminal disease. But these moments are dragged down by the over emphasis of her feelings. Meredith also chooses to ignore chronology again and again, and also leaves huge holes in her story - just when we are rivited by her story, she jumps to a whole new part of her life. For instance, one chapter ends with her in the Middle East, broke, practically naked...then, she decides to go home. The next chapter starts and she has two children. How did she get home? How did she meet and fall in love with the father? What changes in this empty person's life to open up to another human and decide to create a new life? It is a mystery. While there is some good stuff here, and Hall is a talented writer, I found this to be a tedious attempt. I needed more meat, less gravy. Rating:  - An Indictment of Those TimesHaving read some of the reviews, I get the sense that those born of later generations or those who led sheltered lives have difficulty conceptualizing what it was like for a young girl who found herself in Meredith Hall's circumstances. One review even stated that abortion was not an option. Actually, it was -- a dangerous, often fatal, backstreet option performed mostly by unethical practioners under unsanitary conditions. Hall's parents were like many of those times but fortunately not all. Some, rather than shun their child and cast her out, tried to help her, but all so secretly, making arrangements for her to go away for "a long visit," or "to care for a sick relative," in a far away town. Faced with shame and censure by the community, many would react as Hall's did with devastating affects on the girl. Some of the reviewers could not understand why Hall could not just, as we say now, suck it up and move on. I tended to feel that way myself at times while reading the book, but I do understand that not everyone is able to do that. She had lost the love of her parents, and lost the child as well. Those are two heavy losses right there. She also lost the only way of life she had known. Some reviewers felt that Hall lacked feeling in her telling of her story, not expressing warm emotion in other relationships in her life. I believe rather that the trauma of loss caused feeling to be bottled deeply within, beyond her reach for many years. Perhaps that was what the killing of the chickens was about. I found that to be a highly difficult chapter to read, but perhaps it was an important one. Killing of living creatures with names, seemed to represent the killing of her spirit, all her girlhood hopes and dreams that she had experienced. Laying out their bodies was like laying out all the losses. It was after that that Hall seemed able to finally move on. People react differently to different experiences. Another book that readers of Without a Map might enjoy is Stolen Fields: A Story of Eminent Domain and the Death of the American Dream a memoir that traces the effects of a catastrophic event through several generations of a family.
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