Danielle GellerReseñas

Beautiful immersion into Danielle's family, although heartbreaking. The highlights of Rez life and generational struggles is real and raw

This review is not going to address the writing skill, because I had too many internal responses to be fair to the author's skill.
This memoir was triggered by her mother's death, and focuses on life events that involved her parents and how being raised in a dysfunctional family affected her and her sister's lives. I don't think I've read before such a personal and brutally honest portrayal of the effects of alcoholism on a family. Even the time spent in foster care was insufficient to break the demands presented by a parent who needs caretaking.
The blurb I had read led me to assume that when she found her Navajo relations, they would help her heal, yet what she writes shows that life on the reservation was just as full of alcoholism as the life her mother was leading in Florida. Her mother was unable to escape her past, and her sister (so far) hasn't either. The book does lead us to believe that the author, by confronting and naming the damage, will.
The book was full of dialogue, and so moved forward quickly, but brought up thoughts of other people I've known which made me sad. Just the whole state of humanity can easily be overwhelming. This book doesn't have any answers, but does show how one person does her best. It seems that withdrawing to a fantasy world (in this case, online role playing games) helped her keep an emotional distance from the drama around her.
I have briefly been involved in the lives of people who have been stuck in addiction, and --seeing I could do nothing to change them--stepped back. For a child, even an adult child, it seems impossible to create that distance.
The final chapter seems to come out of nowhere: how could she have finally found a partner to trust, after her own years of falling in and out of love so quickly? Did she have any experience in maintaining friendships? I realized how the brief were the glimpses we received of the parts of her life where she was thriving, learning, and changing, but they were present. I look forward to more from this author where she explores this other dimension of her life, and focuses on her strengths.½

My words feel inadequate. I had never felt that kind of love, but I had never learned how to write about happiness.

This is a very powerful book that tackles important topics such as family and identity in a poignant way. It is a meditation on the strength to choose your own path while coming to terms with a complex heritage and fighting the temptation to get sucked into the ongoing destructive cycle that has already claimed so many loved ones.

Geller’s writing is very unique in that it feels so factual and convincing, and at the same time deeply intimate and raw. The book is cleverly structured, with the backbone of the story unfolding in near-chronological order and the spotlight returning on important events in flashbacks. The archival documents, cards, journal entries, and photographs are inserted at just the right places to flesh out the story. I particularly enjoyed the instances where she compares her memory of an event with the respective entry in her mother’s journal.

The memoir is a masterclass in researching, reconstructing, remembering an entire life. Geller’s ability to write and tell a story and her varying confidence in her writing reflect her state of mind during the different periods she talks about. Those statements invite research into writing as therapy and as a way of coping with the weight of life, the weight of the suitcase with the belongings of Geller’s mother, the weight of a heritage that has to be understood and embraced. The descriptions of the Navajo reservation and Geller’s efforts to learn, understand, and connect make for some of the most compelling parts of the memoir.

There is a great honesty in this kind of writing that makes the reader seem almost like an intruder in somebody else’s life. It can be an overwhelming feeling, but it means that the author has done a great job of immersing us into the story, so much so that we seem to tag along on the long drives, curl up on couches between life decisions, feel the disgust when Geller’s father shows up drunk yet again, and shiver at the immense isolation that must have pushed her mother into her downward spiral.

It is by no means an easy book to read, and it can’t have been easy to write either, but it’s truly beautifully written and well worth the emotional investment.

It could have been subtitled “The Book I Wanted to Stop Reading but Couldn’t.” Danielle Geller writes a memoir in which she opens her life to readers and demonstrates amazing strength. Adopted by her paternal grandmother because her parents were alcoholics, her life was a mountain of hurtles. She was continually rescuing and providing shelter for her father and addicted sister. She moved from relationship to relationship. After her mother’s death, she reconnected with family members on the Navajo reservation. Her powerful story is illustrated with photos she found after her mother died. Using her archival training, she adds pictures in archival style as footnotes. She uses her education as a creative writer to write a heart wrenching story of her reconnection to her Navajo family and the future she hopes to have.

Thank you to Netgally and Random House Publishers for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I give this book a solid 5 stars. Danielle Geller is a truly wonderful author with a gift for allowing the reader an unvarnished but compassionate look into her life. She discusses at length how her mother was a caretaker and able to care for others, and how she is not. Ms. Geller is not a caretaker of people, but she is a caretaker of other people's truths. She is able to take care of the truths of herself, her parents, her sisters and her people and create a powerful book.

Dog Flowers is the diary of Danielle Geller, a girl on a journey to the past to find out her mother's truth while in tandem finding her own journey. Having drug and alcohol abuse in my own family, I instantly identified with Danielle in a lot of ways, her words evoking memories of my own past, and unlocking pain that I have carefully tucked away, not yet wanting to deal with. The courage and bravery that Danielle shows by putting her words out there, and sharing her remarkable story, is commendable.

Like a diary, the writing is imperfectly perfect, each chapter focusing on a different facet of life, cohesively going back and forth, from the past to the present. The pan and anguish of finding her mother's life, while trying to find her own, is evident on every page, the vibes making this a depressing, yet surprisingly educational read.

To get a glimpse into another person's life like this is why I am so drawn to memoirs. In Dog Flowers Danielle even includes photos that she found in her mother's things, describing each photo in detail, adding even more depth to the already heavy narrative, bonding you more and more to Danielle and her family.

I found Dog Flowers to be a hard, yet wonderfully powerful story of self-discovery, and motivates me to look to my own family, and find those truths that have been too painful to know.

*I have voluntarily reviewed a copy of this book which I received from the publisher through NetGalley. All views and opinions are completely honest, and my own.

Danielle Gellar’s memoir was a bit different from what I was expecting, but I found I was very much invested in how she moved on with her life after growing up in such a dysfunctional family.

It’s sad to think that such an unstable family situation is what some children know as normal and this was the case with Gellar’s family. Alcoholism and brief stints in jail become somewhat of a regular occurrence. Raised mainly by their paternal grandmother, Danielle and her sister manage to keep a connection with their parents, even though they see them sporadically.

Danielle’s mother was raised on a Navajo reservation, but left as a young woman and seemingly abandoned her heritage, having little contact with her family remaining on the reservation. As a result, Danielle and her sister are only able to fill in the blanks after their mother has passed away.

There wasn’t as much information about the Navajo traditions and life on the reservation as I was hoping for. It seems as if Gellar may have been a bit overwhelmed and unable to absorb it all in the few visits she made. Also, there were some situations on the reservation she wisely began to avoid. I did like the fact that she learned to weave, so it was good to see her embrace that part of her heritage.

Trigger warnings for those readers sensitive to drug and alcohol abuse.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for allowing me to read an advance copy and give my honest review.

Like many writers, author Danielle Geller grew up in a family marked by alcoholism and self-destructive behavior. Geller's family is further notable in that they are Navajo. Despite her own bipolar disorder and the lingering effects of childhood separations and trauma, Geller lived to tell the tale that her parents and sister could not.

This book did not separate itself for me from the mass of dysfunctional family memoirs until about halfway in, when Geller travels to Arizona to meet her long-lost relatives. The memoir becomes more vivid when it draws upon Geller's own experiences, rather than family history.

I liked this book, but I didn't love it as much as I thought I would.

I received an electronic pre-publication copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I was not compensated in any way.