Going Down Swinging

This author is worth checking out. I absolutely loved this book and couldn't put it down.

I put this on my Christmas list because the cover caught my eye while cruising the store. I would not have bothered if I did not get it, but Santa was kind - and intuitive. It is brilliant. The two characters absorb the reader until the very last page. Livingston writes them in such a way as you move from being one to the other with each chapter. The portrayal of the alcoholic mother and the getting-to-be disassociated child is masterly. A triumph in the story, a triumph in the telling.

The plot summary suggests a downer. It isn't. Going Down Swinging is an ENGAGING, UPLIFTING and FUNNY adventure. It's a Homeric odyssey in which mother and daughter must overcome modern obstacles on their journey back to the safety of their home.

ENGAGING - because Livingston is a brilliant storyteller. Christmas trees and Christian zealots, welfare workers and mental institutions, bookmobiles and doctor's offices, every chapter is a new adventure that challenges our heroes and keeps us glued to the narrative.

UPLIFTING - because we fully empathize with both mother (Eileen) and daughter (Grace). We're drawn in. We become Grace and Eileen. We feel their fear and frustration. We root for them. And we're elated when they shrewdly triumph over their adversaries.

FUNNY - because Eileen and Grace are funny. When Eileen is narrating, the entrapment and desperation of the scene pulls at your heart, but her clever wise cracking wit will make you laugh out loud. When Grace is narrating, the helplessness and confusion draw you in, but her innocent child's eye way of sorting out her world keeps you laughing.

Start reading this book in the morning, because you won't put it down until the end.

Billie Livingstone has done an absolutely masterful job of revealing a world in which everyone is broken and no one is irredeemable. Her characters are so true, and so troubled, that the book is often painful to read. It is impossible to be a thinking person and not be reminded, on every dreadful, dark page, that the line between that world and our own is as thin as a drinking problem or falling in love with the wrong man once too many times. At the same time, there is hope -- not much, but a thin wisp of it that makes the book impossible to put down once begun. And there is love, compelling evidence that a mother's love is perhaps the most trancendent aspect of the powerful and wondrous human spirit.

Without judgement, without a shred of dramatics or self-pity, Ms. Livingstone follows her characters through days so dreary and dangerous that we wonder not even if they will survive, but if there is a point. Just when we have given up on their behalf, surrendered, joy is delivered as a pizza with extra cheese ... and we remember why life is worth living even in the hardest moments.

Like life itself, this story is both painful and worth showing up for.