Mia's Reviews > Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

I'll be the odd reader out here on Goodreads and admit I did not like this book. There were some lovely sentences, some very nice connections established between ideas....but there was a lot of clunk, too.

One of the disappointments for me is that the book doesn't so much document how "ordinary" families have dealt with unexpected horizontal identities in their children as it documents how extraordinary and wealthy families have done so--except in the chapters about rape and crime....there, it seems the poor could be included, while the non-poor must be excluded. Except for Dylan Klebold.

The book reads as if Solomon recruited families by placing an ad in the back of The Atlantic. The poor and working-class families I work with face the same challenges as the parents of autistic, intellectually disabled, deaf, etc., children Solomon writes about, but with none of the access to information, services or respite afforded by wealth. I hesitate to suggest anything that would have made the book even longer, but I don't feel like he's given a realistic description of family responses to unexpected horizontal identities when he's leaving out the vast majority of families and most of those without the buffers that can help parents tolerate very difficult caretaking situations.

As for his focus on poor families in the chapter on crime, sigh. Low hanging fruit. What about all the criminal kids from higher income families? They are all around. If he didn't look for those kids, ergh. If he looked and their parents wouldn't talk, then (again, not to make the book longer, but come on!) say so, and say something about what that means.