Lifesaving Lessons: Notes from an Accidental Mother
by Linda Greenlaw
Rating: **
Read 8/3/2013

I have enjoyed Greenlaw’s previous memoirs. This one fell flat for me for a number of reasons. In her quest to protect the privacy of her young charge, much detail around the girl’s backstory is positively impenetrable. I don’t know if she was trying to fill up the book with other things to disguise this, or if she’s just gotten really boring- but I barely made it through the interminable bit about rescuing some chunk of fishing gear. Turns out I could have skipped that whole section, because it never comes up again. There are a lot of little dangling story bits throughout, and some of the most important and compelling sections of the story are merely alluded to in passing. It was mostly a frustrating book.