Madeleine's World

Praise

Praise for Madeleine’s World:

“Even nonparents will be fascinated by Madeleine’s World for the ways it delves deep into the thought patterns and imaginative leaps readers half-remember from their own childhoods; for parents, the book—in its insistence that to pay attention is to love—can be almost unbearably moving.” —Slate, “The 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Past 25 Years” 

“A most welcome book in a society that loudly celebrates the sentimental notion of family while paying scant attention to the hearts and minds of the messy, ecstatic, sometimes ugly and endlessly eventful lives of the children who actually make families possible . . . Hall stuns with his observational powers and emotional truth . . . [and] succeeds dazzingly at making his daughter and the toddler sensibility come alive.” —Los Angeles Times

“This wonderful ‘biography’ of a baby manages to avoid almost every cliché in the child-development handbook. Using fresh, revealing details, novelist Hall keeps his wits—and wit—about him . . . This is an enthralling journey into a baby’s dramatic world.” —Entertainment Weekly

“A delightful, resonant account of a journey we have all taken but, for the most part, forgotten . . . Hall recreates the gains and losses of growing up in all their bittersweet glory . . . By investing Madeleine’s tiny, often comic struggles with so much meaning, Hall in turn confers an enormous dignity on all adults who undertake the humble, relentless task of being there for small children.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Hall brims with imaginative and convincing interpretations of his daughter’s every eye-movement from birth onwards, his antennae sharpened—but never biased—by love . . . One re-experiences the world through Madeleine’s eyes, and her closing words about death are so full of human hope I cried.” —The Observer (London)