HERO MAMA by Karen Spears Zacharias
Karen Spears Zacharias lost her father to the war in Vietnam in 1966. She was nine years old. Her father, David Spears, left behind a wife, a son, and two daughters. HERO MAMA is Karen's account of how that family survived. It is a painfully honest book and is written so intently that the readers' eyes ache from the strain of absorbing it all.
As Karen recounts the seconds, minutes, hours and days following the death of her father, she adopts the vernacular of a nine-year-old. And as the pages spread over the years her voice grows and changes as she does. Karen becomes a teenager and then a young woman and finally a wife and mother. The readers are with her at every step of the way and she lets them look at her life from the inside out.
Karen doesn't glorify herself in any way, nor does she paint an angelic picture of her mother or her brother. It is only her sister Linda who manages to be painted with an adoring brush. Her mother is portrayed as being slightly promiscuous and her brother has a drug problem. Karen has a sassy mouth and does not always choose her friends wisely.
The heart of the story is seeing how the family does manage to hold itself together after the husband/father is killed in Vietnam. Shelby Spears, Dave's wife, is left with three children and no visible means of support. She has a ninth grade education and no job. With pure grit and determination she manages to get a nursing degree and support her children.
The Spears family lives in Georgia for most of the sixties and seventies and Karen's story is an authentic telling of the times and their texture. Her descriptions ring so true that you are suddenly transported back to those conflicted decades. You can hear the music and you can feel the heat.
The weakest part of the book is the final portion. Karen gives us her life in total detail up until the time she goes to college. From that point on we only get the high spots of her education, subsequent marriage, birth of her children, and then her trip to Vietnam. This last event is obviously of great importance to her, but for the reader it is not enough about Karen but more about her father and the country where he died.
The reader has grown so attached to the narrator by this time that any departure from the detailed moments of her life is cause for disappointment. And in this final portion there are no details about her adult life, rather it is just a fast forward picture of what occurred. Still this failure of the ending should not overshadow the successful writing of the first two thirds of the book.
Karen Spears Zacharias is a wonderfully talented writer who was so determined to get her family's story told that she spared no secrets. She just put the words on paper as to what transpired and let the chips fall where they might. For that honesty and for the pain she suffered after the loss of her father, the book might more correctly be titled HERO DAUGHTER.
HERO MAMA is published by William Morrow. It contains 361 pages and sells for $24.95.