Review by shaffer1988 -- The Land of Sunshine and Hell

[shaffer1988]

[Following is a volunteer review of "The Land of Sunshine and Hell" by Maxene Raices.]

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2 out of 4 stars

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The Land of Sunshine and Hell: A Memoir of a ‘60s Unwed Mother by Maxene Raices is an autobiography that recounts the life experiences that motivated Ms. Raices to succeed in life and shaped her into the woman she would eventually become.

In the book, Ms. Raices and her boyfriend, Romolo, find that at the young age of seventeen, she has become pregnant with Romolo’s child. Since it was very taboo in the 1960s for a young, unwed mother to raise her child openly, the fate of the pregnancy was decided upon by Ms. Raices parents and Romolo’s parents. It was decided that the pregnancy would be hidden, and the baby would be given up for adoption.

My rating for this book is 2 out of 4. I believe this book may be comforting to other women from this era who had given their children up for adoption. Knowing that they were not alone and that there were many other young, unwed mothers could possibly help these women come to terms with their own traumatic experiences. While I appreciate the idea of a memoir from someone who has given their child up for adoption, I did not feel like this book was able to go into enough detail about the emotional trauma that stems from the experience. I would have liked to have seen the book focus more on the events that happened during the pregnancy, the birth, the adoption process, and the next few years. As a mother who has not experienced any of these events, it was hard for me to connect with Ms. Raices and her story.

This booked seemed to lack any type of organization to the chapters, and a lot of unnecessary information. For example, we may learn about one thing in chapter A, and then chapter B takes us back to something that happened before chapter A. Then chapter C takes us back to where we left off at the end of Chapter A. Along with the disorganization of the books, I felt that a lot of the chapters were unnecessary and led away from the topic of the book. From chapter twelve until chapter twenty-three of the thirty-two chaptered book, there are only some references to the child Ms. Raices had given up for adoption. While some of the information in these chapters were beneficial to show how Ms. Raices grew as a person, overall, the stories did not support the idea that this is a memoir of a 1960s unwed mother, and ultimately, I found the book to be uninteresting.

One last thing I did not like about this book is that it gave me the impression that the Ms. Raices was trying to use big words to make her seem smarter than those who are reading her book. I consider myself to be a very intelligent individual and I found myself using the dictionary tool on my Kindle to look up words quite a bit. I have hardly ever had to use the dictionary tool on any other book I've read. I think if Ms. Raices focused more on the details of her story than using extravagant wording, the book would have been much better.

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The Land of Sunshine and Hell
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