"Seven stories detailing child custody cases across nearly two hundred years, proves how desperately tragic these cases can be in this powerful, thought-provoking, and moving book."
Gosh, Custody is such a powerful read, personal and intimate, yet far-reaching and all-encompassing, it welcomes all as seven custody cases over nearly two hundred years are told as stories, reviewed and analysed. The often absurd and tragic nature of the legal system within custody cases is an incredibly difficult subject to negotiate. Author Lara Feigel acknowledges how traumatising it can be for all, and as she says, there are no winners. She has obviously completed a huge amount of research, and while focusing on seven particular women across time, it is clear that far more of these stories have become a part of her, particularly when stepping into modern cases. The women here, have been found wanting, and treated with disdain, control, and punishment. The children in these utterly heartbreaking stories are so often unheard, isolated and in effect punished themselves. Feminism and motherhood are examined, the devastating effects of parental alienation, unaccountable judges, and complex systems are investigated. This makes for incredibly emotional reading, it is explicit, yet thoughtful and balanced, and so joins our LoveReading Star Books and also sits as a Liz Pick of the Month. As historical and modern child custody cases merge into an explicit warning, Custody proves itself an immensely important and powerful book.
| Primary Genre | History |
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'A GREAT ROAR OF A BOOK' Sunday TimesWe think that our children belong to us, but families are fragile things.Every day, for over a century, children have been moved between homes because of law cases that decide their fates. Yet child custody is curiously absent from history books and from how we generally understand our world. Lara Feigel's groundbreaking book shows the fraught, complex territory of child custody to have been one of the vital battlegrounds of modern history and culture.Custody is the story of seven women - Caroline Norton, George Sand, Elizabeth Packard, Frieda Lawrence, Edna O'Brien, Alice Walker, Britney Spears - who have fought for their children and been found wanting. It is also the story of the children who have lost the care they most need because divorce is at heart a macabre continuation of matrimony in a new setting, with the battles of the marriage stoked into new levels of acrimony by the courts.It's a book of dramatic storytelling, and of blistering polemic and large-scale historical re-evaluation. Each chapter immerses the reader in the life and times - and struggles - of these fascinating, charismatic, complex women and their children. All of these women were mothers, but all of them wanted and needed to be other things too - writers, lovers, or activists - and they and their children were punished for these attempts.Feigel has been deep in the archives, looking into thousands of other cases in each place and time, and she's been sitting in on the family courts in the present. So alongside these central figures, the book presents a teeming picture of fractured family life in Britain, Europe and North America across two hundred years, offering a major new interpretation of how our modern culture has evolved. And Custody is an alternative history of feminism, centring on the fraught relationship between emancipation and care.This book is of urgent interest to anyone concerned with women's roles in the world and how institutions fail them. Ultimately it's a book that sees custody as the nexus where motherhood, ideology and power meet. Custody cases can seem in these chapters to be quintessentially tragic, but the stories of these passionate, conflicted women also make us want to figure out how to do things better.
Custody features in the following genres: Liz Robinson's Picks of the Month, Recommendations, Star Books, History, Family law: legal guardianship, Feminism and feminist theory, Gender studies: women and girls, Family law: marriage, separation and divorce, Family law: children, Law and society, gender issues, Legal history, Family psychology, Family and health
Custody is available in Paperback, Hardback
Custody was written by Lara Feigel and published by William Collins an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Custody has 432 pages
£9.89
