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Rating: 
Summary: Stunning!
Review: Show Me the Way is a gorgeously written memoir for real mothers everywhere. The stories weave together seamlessly into a true picture of motherhood, with its highs and lows. I recommend this highly.
Rating:
Summary: Heartwarming, not heartbreaking
Review: Show Me the Way is Jennifer Lauck's third memoir, and continues to demonstrate her fine writing skills. Jennifer has an amazing ability to examine the best and worst of humankind through the eyes of her life, communicating tremendous joy and grief with clarity and honesty. Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found is the story of Lauck's early childhood, which began with adoption by two loving parents and quickly slid into horrible abuse after their deaths. Stillwaters follows Jennifer to her adoption by her father's sister and through adolescence where resentment and anger took the place of love, caring, and compassion. Through both of these books, the reader senses Jennifer marking time until adulthood, freedom, and independence. Show Me the Way delivers the next step of Jennifer's journey as she and her husband start a family. Jennifer faces many of the same challenges as other women that are attempting to balance the roles of mother, wife, lover, and self. Interspersed with Jennifer's depiction of the physical emotion of childbirth and rearing are recollections of Jennifer's own childhood and the loss of her parents. The reader can almost feel Jennifer reaching back in time to her mother and father, both requesting and sending love and acceptance. Approaching the birth of her second child, Jennifer seeks to make sure her son will never hurt his younger sister. Wrapped through these conversations is the love Jennifer's brother was afraid to feel and her sadness at his suicide in his early twenties. After searching for adulthood for so long, Jennifer finally finds discovers it comes in fragments like fighting for your children with the pediatrician, or embracing a moment of child induced chaos during a Starbucks morning filled with people eager to get to their offices. Show Me the Way is not as gripping or heartrending in the same way as Blackbird or Stillwaters, and it should not be. It would be too simplistic to call Jennifer a survivor, for her spirit and ability to envelope the reader into her heart is something more. Although Show Me the Way is strong enough to stand on its own, it is best read after Jennifer's first two books so the reader can live Jennifer's journey with her.
Rating:
Summary: Complex, stirring, intense
Review: With her flawless writing and sure hand, Lauck tells a painful story that isn't maudlin and doesn't beg for sympathy -- it just is. If you liked this book, you might try "An Egg on Three Sticks" by Jackie Moyer Fischer, "Sights Unseen" by Kaye Gibbons, and "A Girl in Parts" by Jasmine Paul.
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