Rating: 
Summary: Definetly not a book to miss!
Review: I wrote a review on this book when I was probably only a third through it. It was a good review but now that I'm finished it doesn't say enough. This book moved me so much. I cried and I felt healing because yes I have too been through this. I was actually feeling guilty about some of the thoughts and emotions I was having with my own daughter but this author had shared those same feelings and it truly did set me free. Anyone with a teenager that has gone astray or even drifted away absolutely MUST read this. Please don't miss this one!!
Rating:
Summary: It's real, folks.
Review: Martha is the daughter of writers and more importantly, writers who are journalists. In this family, people share their experiences without veneer and without excuses: This is what happened and how I saw it then and how I see it now. I'll take you there and maybe it will help you. Maybe it will kick you in the gut. Maybe both. You don't have to be raising a Problem Child to identify with Martha Dudman. You just have to have loved someone.
Rating:
Summary: Harrowing. Heatbreaking. Honest. Couldn't put it down.
Review: Martha Tod Dudman has been to hell and back with her daughter. This is a true story of her trying to navigate through her daughter's crazy, out of control and extreme adolescence. It is so painful to read that at times I felt like a voyeur peeking in their bedroom window, but that's what makes it good. She's a great writer, and takes an unflinching look at herself and her shortcomings as a mother. Anyone who's ever been a teen struggling for their own sense of self in all the worst ways they can think of (drugs, stealing, lying, etc) or a parent trying to "be there" while letting their child find their own way will relate to something in this book. Sort of a "Girl, Interrupted" from a self-aware mother's perspective.
Rating:
Summary: Must reading--before your child is a teen
Review: Martha Tod Dudman has written a gut-wrenching, powerful, brave, and ultimately hopeful book about her attempts to save the life of her teenage daughter, Augusta. In her early teens, Augusta became rebellious beyond the norm and acted out by drinking, drugging, and disappearing for days on end - both physically and emotionally. Dudman writes of what she went through - guilt, questioning her parenting, wondering why this had happened to her, punishment, being a "jailer" - in a way that draws the reader in and makes you feel her despair at ever being able to make things "right" again. She had tried so conscientiously to be a good parent and when her relationship with Augusta changed to that of constant confrontation and anger, she was in agony. When Dudman tried to figure out what went wrong, she said "You don't know if it's because her mother works too much, or because your daughter's too smart for her classes, or because she has maybe a learning disability you never caught, or because her teacher has a learning disability or isn't smart enough to teach your daughter. Or maybe . . . she is becoming a teenager and this is how they act." She also talks about looking for answers in parenting books. This section just grabbed my guts: "They only talked about little problems. When your child begins to show different patterns -- changes in eating patterns, changes in sleeping patterns, depression, mood swings, schoolwork slipping -- choose one. . . . How about when the whole child collapses? How about when everything is wrong all the time and she is screaming at you and threatening you with a knife and you are crying and she is crying and it feels like the end of your life? Where's the book for that?" The ultimate decision, made with the help of an educational counselor, was to send Augusta away--first to a wilderness program out west (they lived in Maine) and then to a boarding school for troubled youth. I really admire this author for being so honest and sharing so much of her life in this book. This is a topic that is usually not talked about, except in whispers or in the privacy of one's home. Hopefully, it will help other parents to realize that they are not alone.
Rating:
Summary: A book full of both despair and hope
Review: Most parents with teenagers know all too well the highs and lows of teen life, alternating between manic bursts of happiness and spiraling, sudden depths of pain and confusion. But the author of this book, Martha To Dudman, has a daughter who goes beyond even the extreme highs and lows of many teens. She is truly in trouble, deep in emotional pain and taking out much of her frustration and anger on her mother. There is one paragraph in this book which struck home to me and echoed my own fears and worries (and probably that of most parents) when their teen is particularly emotional or upset: "When your daughter is eleven, when your daughter starts to act different, you don't know if it is because her parents are divorced. You don't know if it's because her mother works too much, or because your daughter's too smart for her classes, or because she has maybe a learning disability you never caught, or because her teacher...isn't smart enough to teach your daughter. Or maybe it doesn't have anything to do with school at all. Maybe she is becoming a teenager and this is how they act. Maybe they are supposed to be quiet like this and stay up in their rooms." Honesty like this runs through this book, the kind of gut-felt honesty that speaks from the heart- and reached the heart of this reader. I'd say this one is a MUST for parents of teenagers, highly recommended for anyone else as well.
Rating:
Summary: Growing pains for both child AND parent!
Review: Readers could relate to this poignant and heartwrenching memoir. After all, you are either a son/daughter or a parent. Although I am not a parent yet, I was, as most teenagers are, a troubled child -- not to the degree of Augusta, but troubled nevertheless. This memoir is told by a very determined and strong mother who watched as her daughter plummeted into a life of drugs, alcohol and reckless sex and wondered how she had failed as a parent and what could be done to save her daughter. Parents could easily be disturbed with a book of this nature -- after all, it is so much easier to ignore all the red flags and pretend that the child in question is just going through some normal growing pains -- because no one would like to see his or her child become a menace to society. And, worst of all, would that mean that their parenting skills weren't good enough? It is important to acknowledge what the parent has done wrong and do whatever possible to be there for the child. And that is what Martha did. Hats down for writing such an intelligent and insightful memoir. There should be more books of this kind out there!
Rating: 
Summary: overwrought, narcissistic and self-pitying memoir crumbles
Review: Since we now live in a nation where affluent, clueless parents are raising hideously out-of-control children, Martha Tod Dudman's memoir, "Augusta, Gone," will find an eager reading audience. Undoubtedly, the excessively repetitive and banal "Gone" will be hyped as a necessary self-help manual for bewildered, distraught parents. The reality is that this overwritten lamentation features two signficant characters: a screwed-up teenaged daughter and her equally screwed-up presumably adult mother. Augusta is an execrable excuse of a child: blithely ignoring the love, suggestions and admonitions of her mother, she smokes, drinks, does drugs, sneaks out at night and hangs out with whatever low-lifes exist in her bucolic Maine seaport town. The scope of "Augusta, Gone" is what will become of this teen-aged mess and how her dippy mother survives repeated, but predictable, disappointment after disappointment. The author is herself a textbook recipe of why certain people should not become parents. As an indulged Jewish American Princess, Martha is suspended from her trendy prep school as a teenager and not permitted to attend graduation, to the consternation of her long-suffering mother. Consistently breaking her own parents' hearts, she trips on acid, wanders around the nation and Europe (presumably in search of some purpose for her life), and settles into a marriage which dissolves shortly after producing two children. Unable to find employment, Martha's mother does what any parent would; she provides her own daughter with a series of radio stations to own. Thus, by the time Martha begins to realize that as an adult, she has some serious responsibilities to shoulder, she hasn't an inkling as to what the idea of moral responsibility means. Is it any surprise that Martha's daugher becomes a living reincarnation of the mother? Augusta, in turn, is obnoxiously rebellious and unbelievably insensitive to the dynamics of her own family. The daughter's self-absorbtion mirrors her mother's narrow selfishness; neither character elicits sympathy because both are out of orbit with the realities of modern American life. Augusta is able to recycle misery on her family precisely because she knows that her mother has a limitless supply of "love." There simply is no motivation to change; why should there be? Whenver Augusta returns from her infuriating escapades, Martha is right there to forgive and forget, if only her daughter would utter the magic words, "Mommy, I love you." Readers will wade through nearly two hundred fifty pages of teen-age abuse, self-piteous lamentations and family dysfuction to discover the memoir's two incredible epiphanies: 1) raising children is really tough work and 2) even after we love our children, they can break our hearts. If your own experience has already taught you these esoteric lessons, "Augusta, Gone" will be exactly that -- gone.
Rating:
Summary: overwrought, narcissistic and self-pitying memoir crumbles
Review: Since we now live in a nation where affluent, clueless parents are raising hideously out-of-control children, Martha Tod Dudman's memoir, "Augusta, Gone," will find an eager reading audience. Undoubtedly, the excessively repetitive and banal "Gone" will be hyped as a necessary self-help manual for bewildered, distraught parents. The reality is that this overwritten lamentation features two signficant characters: a screwed-up teenaged daughter and her equally screwed-up presumably adult mother. Augusta is an execrable excuse of a child: blithely ignoring the love, suggestions and admonitions of her mother, she smokes, drinks, does drugs, sneaks out at night and hangs out with whatever low-lifes exist in her bucolic Maine seaport town. The scope of "Augusta, Gone" is what will become of this teen-aged mess and how her dippy mother survives repeated, but predictable, disappointment after disappointment. The author is herself a textbook recipe of why certain people should not become parents. As an indulged Jewish American Princess, Martha is suspended from her trendy prep school as a teenager and not permitted to attend graduation, to the consternation of her long-suffering mother. Consistently breaking her own parents' hearts, she trips on acid, wanders around the nation and Europe (presumably in search of some purpose for her life), and settles into a marriage which dissolves shortly after producing two children. Unable to find employment, Martha's mother does what any parent would; she provides her own daughter with a series of radio stations to own. Thus, by the time Martha begins to realize that as an adult, she has some serious responsibilities to shoulder, she hasn't an inkling as to what the idea of moral responsibility means. Is it any surprise that Martha's daugher becomes a living reincarnation of the mother? Augusta, in turn, is obnoxiously rebellious and unbelievably insensitive to the dynamics of her own family. The daughter's self-absorbtion mirrors her mother's narrow selfishness; neither character elicits sympathy because both are out of orbit with the realities of modern American life. Augusta is able to recycle misery on her family precisely because she knows that her mother has a limitless supply of "love." There simply is no motivation to change; why should there be? Whenver Augusta returns from her infuriating escapades, Martha is right there to forgive and forget, if only her daughter would utter the magic words, "Mommy, I love you." Readers will wade through nearly two hundred fifty pages of teen-age abuse, self-piteous lamentations and family dysfuction to discover the memoir's two incredible epiphanies: 1) raising children is really tough work and 2) even after we love our children, they can break our hearts. If your own experience has already taught you these esoteric lessons, "Augusta, Gone" will be exactly that -- gone.
Rating:
Summary: Sorry, No Thanks
Review: There are many interesting memoirs out there...I did not enjoy this book. This might be of use for people that have problem children, but no thanks.
Rating:
Summary: Sorry, No Thanks
Review: There are many interesting memoirs out there...I did not enjoy this book. This might be of use for people that have problem children, but no thanks.
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