Review: Tiny Family Therapist
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 28, 2013
Just what does an oriental girl doing a ballet jete have to do with a story about a NC Irish step dancer?  Nothing.  Please, this is a great book; it deserves a better cover. I am a sucker for coming of age books about hard life lessons moving a child into adulthood--this book has a twist in which the kid has the maturity and insight, but her parents need the hard life lessons to grow up. Most authors go from one extreme to another in portraying families--either parents are the Waltons and Cleavers or else drunken abusive monsters. This is one of the rare in-between books about a really human family of flawed, foolish, but well-intentioned losers, trying hard to force their kids into their own misconceived loser mold while being too proud and set in their loser ways to allow their children to be independent individuals, that is, until life smacks them upside the head--hard--more than once.  This is not fluff fiction but heart and soul realism, tragic at times but filled with enough human spirit and resilience to not be dismal.Hickman is one of my favorite authors, I have got to read the rest of her novels just to see if she has ever written any book that is less than wonderful.