****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This is a wonderful and powerful story about overcoming life's challenges and coming to terms with the past. Filled to the brim with passion and humor but also a good measure of pain, and in places outright tragedy, Charlotte's story stays with you long after you've finished the final page. Like life itself, it’s chaotic and contradictory story, but it’s a unique narrative from someone who never settled. Set in a turbulent time and place -- Southern California through the 1960s and 70s -- Charlotte grows up in a large and immensely dysfunctional family, headed by a beautiful, charismatic, and utterly self-indulgent mother who’s also intent on isolating Charlotte from her loving grandparents and biological father. After becoming pregnant, not once, but twice, well before her 17th birthday, and giving up both children for adoption, Charlotte's story takes an almost unbelievable series of twists of turns. Banned from the family home following her pregnancies, Charlotte marries young but then abandons domestic life completely. What follows is a much more exciting but at times chaotic existence. She works as a drug courier and is living the high life, but becomes addicted to cocaine and to an increasingly destructive lifestyle. She breaks free of drugs—and the dangerous men in her life—and, longing for freedom, heads to Europe with the slate wiped clean. But carefree adventure gives way to danger, illness, and desperation, until finally Charlotte finds herself working as a low-level smuggler to make ends meet. Once she returns to the US, she begins the long, winding journey towards a fulfilling life and career and towards liberation and self-discovery. She finds her biological father, re-connects with the grandfather her mother had forbidden her to see, and finally set out to find the children she was forced to give up all those years before.Charlotte writes with almost painful honesty about her own mistakes, about the cruelty and heartlessness of those who should have been on her side, and about the darker side of life in California in the 1960s and 1970s. She captures the era with incredible skill; but more important, she captures the pain that’s an essential element of every life well-lived. An incredible, memorable story that touches the soul and make you root for the underdog. Give Baby Doll a chance – you won’t be disappointed.
