Author: Sandy Powers

ISBN: 978-1-4567-2954-7

The book opens as the author brings her mother home from the hospital, there to die. After her mother’s death, she discovers her mother’s journals along with letters, news articles and historical documents in boxes her mother had left for her children. The journals are corroborated by the newspaper articles and enhanced by the letters and tell stories of astonishing drama. The author adds no embellishment whatsoever but allows her mother to tell the story of her tragic childhood in straight forward, matter of fact language. Rather than dwell on her sad past, this strong woman focuses on the best part of her life: the love she finds and maintains with her husband. She describes their meeting and the “love at first sight” attraction in the same matter of fact language she uses to describe her stepmother’s abuse.

Clearly this was a woman who took life’s ups and downs in her stride and did what she needed to “get it done” whatever the job at hand might be. This love that she shares with her husband is stronger than the sad losses of childhood and gives her the strength and confidence to bring five children of her own into the world. It also gives her the strength and courage to conquer cancer in the early fifties when treatment was more experimental than it is today. Her response to her cancer diagnosis is representative of her response to life generally: she tells her doctor that with a husband and five children “dying is not an option”.

Ultimately cancer returns to claim her life but not until she has raised the children to adulthood and spent what I calculate must be close to seventy years with the love of her life. I won’t spoil the impact of the amazing events she writes about in her journals by describing the unusual details of her life but do highly recommend that the reader discover them by reading this brief and fascinating book. I’ll just whisper the words “murder”, “war”and “spy” and you begin to get the picture. I don’t know if the author has plans to write about her own memories of a life with her amazing mother but I for one would be most interested in reading it. Grace Balogh was definitely a woman worth knowing. Congratulations to her daughter for putting together this tribute.