Lynn Alsup

Tinderbox is an interesting and sometimes powerful memoir about a white couple’s adoption of not one but three troubled children. Each of the Alsup daughters had some degree of Black ancestry, and two were ultimately identified as having fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Those diagnoses were a long time coming.

Author Lynn Alsup, a social worker, documents the multiple approaches/modalities/therapies that were employed with the girls, and she explains how her understanding of what was going on with her children evolved. The eldest, a child of Haitian ancestry who was also diagnosed with complex developmental trauma, underwent psychiatric hospitalization and spent extensive time at two residential treatment facilities some distance away from the family home. It’s no understatement to say the Alsup family—Lynn, Jeff, and the kids—went through hell. Home life could be and often was chaotic, stressful, and even violent. “Consequences” for infractions and meltdowns simply did not work.

Parts of this book would likely be valuable and informative for educators, parents, and family physicians—anyone, really, who interacts with children, youth, or troubled adults, for that matter. While I am able to recommend Tinderbox, I do have some major reservations. First of all, it is too long by at least a third. There is an awful lot of padding: unnecessary descriptions of people (especially their clothes and hair), furniture, rooms . . . you name it. There are also play-by-plays of various routine tasks—e.g., cooking, washing dishes, sipping tea, or painting—that are quite tedious to read. I understand that the author practises mindfulness, but I was not terribly interested in reading what she’s mindful about, including quinoa in boiling water or the position of one’s head when painting a ceiling.

Where reconstructed conversations (from memory) are concerned, less really is more. This means honing rambling dialogue down to the strong bare bones, something the author seldom does. The same economy is in order when reporting on conferences one has attended. Unless truly noteworthy, a speaker’s opening remarks and announcements about coffee breaks, for example, should not be included.

Finally, I have concerns about the number of pages dedicated to the author’s spirituality. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the subject; I’m just doubtful that most readers interested in fetal alcohol syndrome/fetal alcohol spectrum disorder—i.e., the effects of prenatal alcohol exposure on the human brain and behaviour—wish to read quite so much about the author’s Christian/New Age contemplative practice: the retreats, “journaling”, mosaic art, visualizations, meditations, blessing of spaces, and multiple kinds of prayers she performs. On the matter of gratitude specifically: I’m all for it, but a few expressions of thankfulness and appreciation in a book can have more impact than many.

Good stuff can get lost when there’s too much verbiage. It nearly does here. I dearly wish an editor had taken Alsup in hand and urged her to cut large chunks of the manuscript. The Tinderbox would have been better for it.… (más)