Review: Comic, tragic, ultimately uplifting. A wonderful, moving true story.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 10 12, 2013
This is a powerful memoir, deeply moving, at times very funny, but travelling always, inexorably, toward the heart-rending tragedy that is at its core. A finely-crafted true story, following an American family from their earliest years of young marriage, financial and family difficulties, through the births of six children, uprooting to travel across America, living in a haunted house, and more. Always, the tale returns to the terrible accident that robs one beloved child of her life, then launches itself anew to recount the next stages in the family's lives.Finally, almost unbearably, the closing pages detail the last moments of a child so brutally robbed of life, and the agony of the parents and siblings forced to live with the loss of such a shining presence in their lives. But this is not a bitter tale, though it might have been. Far from it. It is a celebration of a life, and lives, and of Life itself, with all its sometimes terrible challenges and sorrows, as well as its joys. Noelle lives on, through and beyond the pages of this book.You won't finish And The Whippoorwill Sang without tears, that's guaranteed, but you will feel uplifted by having read it.