It is 1965, and the country is on the brink of transformation. Soon it will be the Summer of Love. Riots will break out on college campuses. Racial tensions will boil over. Boys will flee to Canada, and anti-war demonstrators will be killed.
In Hampton, Meredith Hall finds herself at the edge of her own transformation. Her family has been torn apart by infidelity and divorce. Her mother’s strict rules have suddenly given way to indifference as she emerges into a new life. Her absentee father has taken on a new family. Her siblings have moved on. Then, on a starless Labor Day night, a few unremarkable moments with an Andover boy on Hampton Beach – “a honky-tonk place in 1965” – change Hall’s life forever. She is 16, and she is pregnant.
The events that follow are painstakingly revisited by Hall in Without a Map (Beacon Press, 2007), a memoir that chronicles the life of a girl who is abandoned in her hour of greatest need. She is expelled from school, rejected by her church. The community shuns her. Her mother casts her off. “She can’t stay here,” she says. Hall’s father and callous stepmother reluctantly take her in; they hide her in a drafty bedroom in Epping, where the baby she will give up for adoption grows in her womb. When she is finally banned from her father’s home forever, there is the sense that the life of Meredith Hall is slowly being extinguished.
Hall’s story is a gripping epic: one that takes the reader on an emotional and physical journey through hardship and loss, introspection and epiphany, and finally survival and forgiveness. Walk beside her from the first moment of betrayal to her desperate pilgrimage through foreign lands and then home – truly home – again, and you will have to remind yourself almost constantly: This was someone’s life. All the while, you can’t help but be captivated by Hall’s undeniable gift for compelling storytelling.
Without a Map is a true “ugly duckling” narrative as the outcast Hall finally finds her place in a cruel world. And it is a powerful example of how one human being’s real-life suffering can be turned into an impressive piece of literature worthy of being read.
Without a Map
By Meredith Hall
Beacon Press (April 2007)
Paperback/256 pages/$14.00
Hardcover/248 pages/$24.95
Meredith Hall, who grew up in Hampton, NH, lives in Maine. Visit www.MeredithHall.org for event information.
Book Review – Without A Map: A Memoir
In Hampton, Meredith Hall finds herself at the edge of her own transformation. Her family has been torn apart by infidelity and divorce. Her mother’s strict rules have suddenly given way to indifference as she emerges into a new life. Her absentee father has taken on a new family. Her siblings have moved on. Then, on a starless Labor Day night, a few unremarkable moments with an Andover boy on Hampton Beach – “a honky-tonk place in 1965” – change Hall’s life forever. She is 16, and she is pregnant.
The events that follow are painstakingly revisited by Hall in Without a Map (Beacon Press, 2007), a memoir that chronicles the life of a girl who is abandoned in her hour of greatest need. She is expelled from school, rejected by her church. The community shuns her. Her mother casts her off. “She can’t stay here,” she says. Hall’s father and callous stepmother reluctantly take her in; they hide her in a drafty bedroom in Epping, where the baby she will give up for adoption grows in her womb. When she is finally banned from her father’s home forever, there is the sense that the life of Meredith Hall is slowly being extinguished.
Hall’s story is a gripping epic: one that takes the reader on an emotional and physical journey through hardship and loss, introspection and epiphany, and finally survival and forgiveness. Walk beside her from the first moment of betrayal to her desperate pilgrimage through foreign lands and then home – truly home – again, and you will have to remind yourself almost constantly: This was someone’s life. All the while, you can’t help but be captivated by Hall’s undeniable gift for compelling storytelling.
Without a Map is a true “ugly duckling” narrative as the outcast Hall finally finds her place in a cruel world. And it is a powerful example of how one human being’s real-life suffering can be turned into an impressive piece of literature worthy of being read.
Without a Map
By Meredith Hall
Beacon Press (April 2007)
Paperback/256 pages/$14.00
Hardcover/248 pages/$24.95
Meredith Hall, who grew up in Hampton, NH, lives in Maine. Visit www.MeredithHall.org for event information.