You Will Not Have My Hate

Gildart Jackson provides a heartbreakingly nuanced performance of this short but significant audiobook. The Bataclan Theatre in Paris was the site of a horrifying terrorist act that took 88 lives in 2015. Leiris describes the first moments of his discovery of the attack, and his wife's death, while he is taking care of his son at home. News trickles in, friends send messages, until eventually the full picture of the carnage becomes known. Jackson's voice communicates both the pain and resilience of Leiris's experience as the author pushes back against the expectation that he express hate. Jackson's performance is reserved, a bit measured but gripping, as he voices Leiris's account of helping his young son through his grief while facing his own. S.P.C. � AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

April 15, 2017

With elegant control, narrator Gildart Jackson embodies the words of French journalist Leiris, who bears witness to the murder of his wife, Hélène Muyal-Leiris, one of the victims of the November 13, 2015, terrorist attack at Paris's Bataclan Theatre. Three days later, Leiris wrote directly to her killers via Facebook: "On Friday evening you stole the life of an exceptional person, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hatred." His post went viral, prompting the publication of this memoir less than a year later. Even as he learns to be both mother and father to his 17-month-old child, Leiris faces the everyday reminders of the loss of Hélène's presence. His journalist's training keeps his writing spare but exact, never allowing for a moment of overindulgence. His is a tribute to his beloved's life, a promise to their precious son, and an indelible declaration against her killers: "For as long as he lives, this little boy will insult you with his happiness and freedom." VERDICT With hate too easy an option in this current climate of finger-pointing, Leiris's honorable response to this horrific tragedy becomes a gift of inspiring humanity. ["Leiris is to be commended for not providing easy answers nor engaging in the platitudinous language that too often infects memoirs of this sort.... Necessary reading for all of us": LJ 11/15/16 starred review of the Penguin Press hc.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.