Replacement Child: A Memoir

Memory and story come to us in fragments, and in a memoir, the author weaves illusion, dream, and memory into a narrative the reader can digest. As we read Replacement Child, we become an active investigator as the author-sleuth Judy Mandel tries to understand the tragic accident that killed one of her sisters and etched grief and scars deep into her family before she was born. The crash of an airplane into their apartment burned her other sister, Linda, who was three years old, and changed her parents' lives forever.Judy believes that she was born as the "replacement child" to fill in for the death of her sister, who remained a ghost-like figure in the memory of the family that surrounded her, but of course Judy as a little girl was not told about the tragedy. Children know what they are not supposed to know as they watch adults sidestep, avoid, or grieve silently. In this memoir of investigation as Judy sorts through letters, newspaper articles, and her own memory, we are engaged in hoping somehow the airplane will miraculously miss its date with death by fire.The author inserts heart-stopping vignettes of her imagined story of each hour before the plane dives into the apartment, then reconstructs the aftermath from her extensive research. We are gripped in the saga, even though at the beginning we know the outcome, but we don't know the author's resolution of her story until the end.I couldn't put this book down. It was helpful to find that the chapters were brief, as if it's too hard for the reader to take in the tragedy all at once, as it must have been for the family. Judy Mandel becomes the witness for all her family as she weaves this amazing memoir of life, death, and love.

I bought this book as I live in the city where this accident occurred. I was just a little girl, the sAme age as Donna. I remember the panic in the city when three airliners crashed in the city within a period of four months. My school was in the direct pathline to Newark Airport and sitting in class on the top third floor we could look up and we could see the passengers seated in the cabins. We often waved to them , and they back at us. I followed The Mandell story in the newspapers and wanted to hear a little more about the crash. While Miss Mandell did talk about the crash she told us more of her individual story. I am truly sorry. For her experiences and that of her entire family. Splitting the chapters and bouncing back and forth made it more difficult to read. Lost my thought processes too many times to give it a great review. The story of the tragedy, Grant you was very hard to relive.Credits for her attempt.

I saw this book mentioned at the end of Judy Blume's "In the Unlikely Event," about three horrendous plane crashes in the early 50s that hit the same New Jersey town in an eight-week span. Having become obsessed with the innocent victims and their families, I grabbed "Replacement Child," a true story of one such family, and gobbled it up.Written by a child conceived after her oldest sister is tragically burned to death and her middle sister suffers lifelong agonies from burns suffered over 80% of her body, "Replacement Child" is an unsparing look at what it is like to bear the weight of a family's unspeakable grief from something that happened before one's birth. Mandel doggedly assembled every newspaper clipping, photo, diary entry, and scraps of paper left behind by her now-deceased parents to put together this story of unspeakable heartbreak and the human will to go on.Mandel's surviving sister, Linda, was hideously scarred by the flames from the fuselage of the second crashed plane, which suddenly dropped through her family's apartment roof into their kitchen, spewing deadly and horrendous destruction. Linda spent a lifetime having multiple surgeries, complications, setbacks and triumphs while her younger sister Judy felt guilty for being pretty and having a normal life. Quite a psychological load for anybody to bear, and Mandel writes with clarity and honesty.What I found harder to read was the account of her present-day life, which she would insert quite jarringly sometimes into her tales of her childhood and the accident itself. Having survived the turbulent sixties and seventies, as did I, Judy Mandel is the survivor of several past marriages and bad mistakes. The good news is that she IS a survivor, and in this book, is now blissfully married with a wonderful young adult son. I am so happy for her, truly, but I could not quite grab on to this part of the book. Her birth to a grieving and broken family and her lifelong struggle to be herself while trying to meet impossible expectations is described so well in the childhood parts of the book--but her ultimate triumph does not read as well, maybe, as I said, because it is inserted throughout the book.I think it might have been better to have described the accident and her childhood, as she did so very well, and then pen an "Afterward," where she says, "and this is what happened to me since then." Just my opinion, and despite this, "Replacement Child" is well worth reading.

I wanted more from this book. A plane crashes into a house and one child is killed and other badly burned. Eventually the parents decided to have another child, a replacement child. Much of the book tells the story of the day the accident happened and how it was such an ordinary day. The rest of the book focuses on the "hard" life of the author, who is the replacement child. She is not loved enough and given enough attention because of her sister's injuries and her parents' pain. I got to point where I didn't care.