Book Tour Review: The Sitting Swing

I'm back today with another book tour review for Pump Up Your Book Promotions.

Title:  The Sitting Swing

Author:  Irene Watson

Review Copy Provided by:  author via Pump Up Your Book Promotions

About the Book:  Irene Watson's pretentious life could go no further until she faced her own past. Her poignant and inspiring memoir begins at the end, in a recovery center, where she has gone to understand a childhood fraught with abuse, guilt, and uncertainty. Her powerful story is a testament that it’s never too late to change your life, never too late to heal.

The Sitting Swing was a rope swing, hung from a tree next to the tiny cottage her Russian immigrant father built by hand from hand-milled logs and mud in Northern Canada in the early 20th century. Any motion at all would smash the child into a vigorous rose bush. It was a sitting swing in a family not given to play, in a childhood stretched between two very different cultures.

Irene was born into a tight Ukrainian-speaking community and a family struggling with guilt, shame, and grief over the death of a first-born child—a son. The old world immigrant culture placed much of the blame for Irene's brother’s death on her mother, causing her to hold her next child close to home, segregated from the new culture, victim to the blunt aggression of male cousins, and scornful townspeople.

About the Author:  Author, entrepreneur, and therapist, her life has taken her on many paths, with breakthrough results and exemplar growth, to find her authentic and true self. She lives with her husband in Austin, Texas. Irene earned her MS in Psychology, with honors, from Regis University in Denver.

My Review:  Another memoir, and I liked it!  I have to say, that for this not being my favorite genre, it's growing on me.  Watson tells a powerful story, that begins at the end.  She starts out in adulthood, then takes you back to her childhood, how it all began, and why she ended up at the recovery center in the first place.  I have a place in my heart for children who go through abuse, and Irene was one of those children.  This is a story that will touch you in more ways than one. 

I thing I really enjoyed was the sprinkling of pictures that were interspersed in the chapters of the book.  They really added the reality feel to Irene's words.  You could actually picture some of the things she mentioned in the book.  It really helped to make the story more personal for me.

Irene Watson pours her heart and soul into this memoir as she tells how she survived a childhood of guilt and abuse, overcame the patterns created by her parents, and became a better person because of it.  It you enjoy memoirs or just a great story, you should read this one!

Irene sent me an extra, autographed copy to giveaway to one of my readers.  Please leave a comment on this post telling me why you'd like to read this, and I'll draw a random winner.  Contest runs until Tue. June 9, and is open to US/Canadian addresses only.  The winner will be posted and emailed on the 10th!

Extra entries can be earned by following (+1), tweeting (+2), blogging (+3).  Good luck!