Review: My Fathers's Keeper by Julie Gregory

Paperback: 298 pages

Publisher: Harper Element (5 Jan 2009)

Language English

ISBN-10: 0007268807

ISBN-13: 978-0007268801

Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 2.6 cm

Source: I got this book out from the library

First sentence: I was born on the day of Liberace, May 16^th  to be exact, The Day of Outrageous Flair.

This book is a true story written in first person as Julie Gregory, it is about her growing up with her father who was schizophrenic, and an unstable mother, it starts from when she was very young through to her growing up into an adult.

Julie feels as though she has to protect her father from everything in order to keep his temperament even, she grew up not knowing about her dads condition and just treated him as though he was a delicate man that need her protection, she felt he relied on her, she promised him that she would always be there for him. 

Julie and her brother spent a lot of their time refereeing their parent’s arguments and suffering the consequences of these arguments.

Her father was a slobbish man with an irritating personality, very racist and a bully Julie was always embarrassed by him in public, her mother was unstable and irritated me highly through out the book which was the intention by the author.

I would say the first half of the book was quite slow paced and filled out with a lot of unnecessary detail, I had no clue her father was schizophrenic until during the second half of the book then blam all of a sudden the symptoms are then mentioned, having grown up around my grandmother who was schizophrenic and having experienced her both medicated and un-medicated i could relate to the symptoms but I could not understand why his symptoms were mentioned so late in the book after her writing all about her childhood growing up with her father as though everything was fine then later contradicting herself by mentioning all these things he used to do and all the abuse he had dished out, this made the book come across all jumbled the story was not told sequentially and it did not flow.

I felt that the story that Julie relayed could have been more clearly written, her story is interesting and sad but was ruined by her style of writing I am afraid to say. 

There were some confusion in parts as she would skip back and forth to events happening in her life in the past and present and I would be thinking hang on a minute what is she talking about now and realise that she has flicked back into her past. Her approach to relaying her story was long winded is how I can sum it up.

During the second half some significant things start to happen but I did not find myself upset at any time the most shocking part of the book was the racism and the N word being used frequently throughout I found this very offensive, but given that it is a true story and if that was what was said then I have accept that.

In the final few chapters of the book there are noticeable spelling mistakes that had been overlooked which is a shame. Also the picture on the over of the book does not resemble Julie as she describes herself to look completely different I found this slightly disappointing because when you are reading someone's true story and there is a picture of the supposed person on the front you would expect it to at least resemble the author.

By the time I finished reading the book I felt like Julie was a troubled friend of mine who’s problems I have listened to in-depth, her story was very troubled yes but I would not say heart breaking enough to make me cry, maybe she should of left her story at her first book Sickened which I have not read but know a bit about. I struggled with this book and am sorry to not be able to give it a glowing review seeing as it is someone’s true story but I like to be honest about what I think about a book so there it is.

Rating: 2/5

Stayed tuned to find out what my next read will be....