Reviews: All Books

Solomon has written a brave, beautiful book that will expand your humanity.

There are some books you read that shake up your preconceptions and challenge you to be better. That's Far from the Tree.

It's an astonishingly smart and provocative book that is both challenging and compassionate and reading it creates a sort of community of its own.

It is hard to imagine a writer other than Solomon who could be more understanding and accepting of the families he interviews and writes about.

Courage, powerlessness, despair, anger and unconditional love: it's all there and usually simultaneously.

A ten-year labour of empathy, generosity and love... a triumphant celebration of the power of parental love.

Solomon... writes a deeply thoughtful, balanced, and highly informed book about what it means to be different from one’s parents’ expectations.

The very existence of Solomon’s book banishes any attempt to claim allowance for ignorance or cowardice.

The messages, the struggles, and the questions posed are important for all of us to consider – whether our children have fallen far from us or not.

He writes perceptively, as son and now parent, of the wondrous miracle of birth and the incipient optimism it engenders, and how parents’ hopes can be dashed when the child they bear does not match their imagined picture.