Review: The importance of unconditional love
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 08 8, 2013
Please leave comments on KymD's 5 sweet pea review at mrsconditreadsbooks.com/index.php/?p=13803I read Michael Murphy's It Should Have Been You (based on a true story) in one sitting. I started it at 4AM and couldn't put it down.Patrick McCleary and his older brother, David, are as close as brothers can be. Frieda McCleary, their mother, favors David while her treatment of Patrick vacillates from ignoring his existence to verbally and sometimes physically assaulting him. The verbal abuses she heaps on poor Patrick are worse than anything she can physically do to him.David does what he can to protect his younger brother while struggling to understand why their mother is so obsessed with him. Truthfully, the only real love in the entire household is the brotherly love between Patrick and David, who is his hero.Then, David is hit and killed by a drunk driver and Patrick's entire life changes when his mother screams, "It should have been you" to him. She joins a fundamentalist church lead by a greasy, smarmy"Reverend" and the whack-jobs in this man's following literally throw Patrick out of his own home (this is AFTER the woman who gave birth to him, who was supposed to love and accept him unconditionally decided he was the Devil's spawn because he was gay and threw away or destroyed every belonging he had).How Patrick survived on the streets and eventually found love and acceptance is harrowing and heart-warming at the same time.In all honestly, I loved this book and, even though Juan is an important part of the story, it's Patrick's strength and will to live that got to me. Trying to write a review is hard because all I want to do is get on my soapbox and rail and cry about how unfair life is. How no parent should ever pick favorites. How no mother should ever, ever, EVER wish her own child dead! But, that's not the purpose of a review.Any parent, guardian, or loved one should read It Should Have Been You to fully understand what can happen when love becomes conditional. In the end, the real loser in this story is Patrick's mother.Michael Murphy wrote a wonderful, heart-breaking, heart-warming, book about what so many gay children deal with. My only complaint? Some of the language used by the kids seems a little...old and staid. There were times that the kids just didn't talk like kids. That, though, is so minor in in relation to the story and the message this book has.Yes, I highly recommend this story. Yes, I invite everyone to think and re-think the importance of unconditional love and parental love. Yes, I suggest you have Kleenex on hand.