Title: A Memoir That Stretches Beyond...
Product review: It's rare I find a memoir that stretches beyond the author's life to embrace mine. In Thistledown Rising, Sean Redmond lets the child he once was run free with the child I didn't realize I'd left behind. Together we explore the Redmond farm and its surroundings. We watch Redmond's father milk cows and his brothers define adolescence as abusing a 1960 Dodge. We explored the workings of Redmond valley, skip stones across the fishing hole, hide from roaming dinosaurs. We look inside our odd and sometimes frightening neighbors' lives and ask, "Is everything always as it seems?" We ask other questions too, like: what does it take for a new family to fit into an old community; what did Tom Redmond's (the author's father) long silences mean; and what keeps a man or a child going-or a community for that matter-when life indicates it's time to "hang it up." Redmond urges me to define hope. Perhaps he already knows. Perhaps hope is as simple as thistledown rising.
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