Reeve Lindbergh

It took awhile to read this book because I wanted to savor each wonderful phrase. The writing is outstanding. Told from the perspective of the youngest child of Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Charles Lindbergh, the reader learns of an idyllic childhood.

After the loss of their first-born son, the Lindbergh's sought time out of sight from the public eye. Wanting to protect their children and themselves from the invasive media and overwhelming curiosity of the public, the rented or purchased homes show more far away from cities.

The children lived in large houses in the country where they could romp and play. With little contact from others than family members, Reeve writes in detail of her love of family and stories of uncles, aunts, grandparents and her parents.

While she absolutely adored her father, she is quite honest regarding his difficult personality and his near constant berating of Anne and the children. Everything had to be exact, including a journal regarding how much was spent for an item. A .05 package of rubber bands had to be noted and explained.

Stating that the house and the family breathed easily when her father left, the reader obtains a picture of a dynamic, charasmatic man who loved his family, was, for the most part a doting father, but simply could not help himself in perfectionism and obsessive, critical demands.

At the time the book was written, Reeve did not know that her father had three other families in Europe. She knew he was missing for long periods of time. She knew her mother had more strength than any other person.

Highly recommended.

Five Stars! show less

I love that this book could have ended with the goose finally being caught after a day of destruction, but instead asks the question why the goose might have escaped in the first place. As a result, the ending is unexpectedly tender. Kellogg’s illustrations are vibrant and full of life and humor, with fun sequences of cause and effect from one page to the next. I also appreciated the unusual rhyme scheme, which further energized the story. C really liked that the first image reveals that show more the goose let himself out of the pen! show less

This is a gem of a book. After reading the Aviator's Wife I was hungry for more info on the Lindberghs and my library search turned up this. Written by the youngest Lindbergh child, Reeve, it is not a linear account, but a true memoir of impressions and memories of growing up with such famous parents and under the shadow of a tragedy. I knew of her as a children's author, but was excited to find this book for adults. She writes beautifully and poetically about the "give-and-take between show more public impression and private memory, each informing, educating, correcting and ultimately humanizing the other, over time. . . I have learned that by pursing my own history consistently, pursuing it with compassion and without fear, I will discover over and over again that the people I love best can never be lost to me." (195) This book was written in 1998, 20+ years after her father's death, and during her mother's slow decline to old age (she died in 2001). Reeve looks at her childhood from the impressionable view of a child, complete with smells, feelings and spatial memory of favorite places and memories of favorite people. She also looks at family dynamics and the sheer force of her father's will ("in his presence we became much more completely and perilously alive") and her mother's intelligence and sensitivity. ("she taught us that any experience worth living through was worth writing about") She also shares her close relationship with her siblings, especially Anne, who died at age 59 from cancer. The importance of place and family identity is explored beautifully and she does not shy away from difficult topics (Charles Lindbergh's perceived antisemitism in WWII, for example) but she also accurately catches the distance a child feels from the life and actions of an adult parent, especially things that happened before her birth. The same goes for the kidnapping. The family resisted letting that define them, to the betterment of all the subsequent children. The title is so apt, as is the cover picture that it predisposed me to a pleasant read and I wasn't disappointed. show less

Once in a while, if you're lucky, you find a book that fits so perfectly into your life that it seems sent by God. This book is that for me. It's about mothers and daughters, about loss, about words, about family, about the unspeakable. It brought pain, but it also brought comfort. It's a book I wish I had written. It's a book I'd give to every woman who, as an adult, loses her mother. It makes me want to find Reeve Lindbergh and thank her.