Started: 10/25/20
Finished: 10/30/20
Year: 2018
Pages: 275
Genre: biographical
Grade: C
Type: ARC Trade Paperback
Reason for reading: Goodsread.com giveaway
Blurb (from back cover): "Sandra Allen did not know her uncle Bob very well. As a child, she had been told he was 'crazy', that he had spent time in mental hospitals while growing up in Berkeley in the sixties and seventies. But Bob had lived a hermetic life in a remote part of California for longer than she had been alive, and what little she know of him came from rare family reunions or odd, infrequent phone calls. Then in 2009 Bob mailed her his autobiography. Typewritten in all caps, a stream of error-riddle sentences over sixty single-spaced pages, the often incomprehensive manuscript proclaimed to be a 'true story' about being 'labeled a psychotic paranoid schizophrenic' and arrived with a pleat to help Bob get his story out to the world.
"In A Kind of Mirracules Paradise, Allen translates her uncle's autobiography, artfully creating a gripping coming-of-age story while sticking faithfully to the facts as her shared them. Lacing Bob's narrative with chapters providing greater contextualization, Allen also shares background information about her family, the culturally explosive time and place of her uncle's formative years, and the vitally important questions surrounding schizophrenia and mental healthcare in America more broadly. The result is a heart-breaking and sometimes hilarious portrait of a young man striving for stability in his life as well as his mind, and an utterly unique lens into an experience that, to most people, remains unimaginable."
Opinion: So this was different. Not sure if I wanted more of his story in his own words or more of his story in her words. The mix of the two just didn't fully work for me.
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