Ambivalent Childhoods: Speculative Futures and the Psychic Life of the Child by Jacob Breslow (review)

Book Reviews an age when teenagers often grapple with identity. Cummins also had access to relatives and friends of Taylor, and to their own letters and memoirs. But most impressive is the additional deep and extensive research she conducted into the social history surrounding Taylor’s life and work. Because June Cummins suffered from ALS in the last few years of her life, she enlisted the aid of her friend, the scholar Alexandra Dunietz, to complete the interviews and final editing. Cummins herself was able to finish a draft of this outstanding biography before her death. In an odd coincidence, Sydney Taylor similarly corrected illustrations for her final book in 1978, while in the hospital dying of cancer. Cummins closes her story of Taylor’s life with words from the eulogy by Taylor’s brother: “We are very proud and grateful that Sydney Taylor will be remembered by readers of the past as well as the future, as the charmingly winsome Sarah, the middle sister in the All-of-a-Kind Family” (319). June Cummins’s biography deftly extends the memory of Sydney Taylor to a new generation.