Ebook261 pages4 hours
Queen for a Day: A Novel in Stories
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this ebook
With “intelligence and sympathy,” this compassionate and darkly humorous debut tells the stories of mothers of children with disabilities (Alison Lurie, Pulitzer Prize–winning author).
After Mimi Slavitt’s three-year-old son, Danny, is diagnosed with autism, she finds herself in a world nearly as isolating as her son’s. It is a position she shares only with mothers like herself, women chosen against their will for lives of sacrifice and martyrdom. Searching for miracles, begging for the help of heartless bureaucracies while arranging every minute of every day for children who can never be left alone, they exist in a state of perpetual crisis, normal life always just out of reach.
In chapters told from Mimi’s point of view and theirs, these women emerge as conflicted, complex individuals, totally unsuited for sainthood, often dreaming of the day they can just walk away. Taking its title from the 1950s reality TV show in which the contestants—housewives living lives filled with pain and suffering—competed with one another for deluxe refrigerators and sets of stainless steel silverware, Queen for a Day portrays a group of imperfect women coping under enormous pressure.
In her impressive debut, Rosaler tells their stories in ironic, precise, and vivid prose, with humor and insight born of firsthand experience, and offers readers “the gut-heaving, throat-choking, darkly comic truth—about parenthood, marriage, love, rage, and hard-won survival” (Eileen Pollack, author of The Bible of Dirty Jokes).
After Mimi Slavitt’s three-year-old son, Danny, is diagnosed with autism, she finds herself in a world nearly as isolating as her son’s. It is a position she shares only with mothers like herself, women chosen against their will for lives of sacrifice and martyrdom. Searching for miracles, begging for the help of heartless bureaucracies while arranging every minute of every day for children who can never be left alone, they exist in a state of perpetual crisis, normal life always just out of reach.
In chapters told from Mimi’s point of view and theirs, these women emerge as conflicted, complex individuals, totally unsuited for sainthood, often dreaming of the day they can just walk away. Taking its title from the 1950s reality TV show in which the contestants—housewives living lives filled with pain and suffering—competed with one another for deluxe refrigerators and sets of stainless steel silverware, Queen for a Day portrays a group of imperfect women coping under enormous pressure.
In her impressive debut, Rosaler tells their stories in ironic, precise, and vivid prose, with humor and insight born of firsthand experience, and offers readers “the gut-heaving, throat-choking, darkly comic truth—about parenthood, marriage, love, rage, and hard-won survival” (Eileen Pollack, author of The Bible of Dirty Jokes).
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Reviews for Queen for a Day
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
2 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Maxine Rosaler, Author "Queen For A Day" has written an emotional and thought-provoking novel. The Genres for this story is Fiction with a realistic feel. The author writes about the main character and other mothers' with Autistic children. The author describes the adults as complex and complicated, each with their own problems. Mimi Slavitt and her husband try to deny that their three-year-old son has Autism. They are finally faced with the fact that Danny is Autistic, and now is the problem of what to do. Mimi finds that in the traditional nursery school and school setting, getting funding for special needs is difficult, and she turns to other mothers in similar circumstances to find out what they would do. She hires an advocate. There are different places that Autistic children can go to. If one is wealthy, the families are at an advantage.Mimi brings up stories of other Autistic children, which are often heartbreaking, and the mother's reactions to their children, which are even more heartbreaking. Some parents are ambivalent, and some are really stressed out. Dealing with children outside of what is considered the "norm" has many challenges. I appreciate that the author has shared the problems of getting the appropriate help to those children and families in need. I would recommend this novel.
Book preview
Queen for a Day - Maxine Rosaler
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