Brilliant!

Considering the subject matter it was surprising that interest could be maintained over 600 pages. Its an account from a family who has a member with Haemophilia who consequently also suffers from medically acquired AIDS. There is some interesting criticism of the medical profession in Australia.

I wasn't writing reviews when I read this. I was blown away by Mr Courtenay's story, the first and only I've read this far. And Damon's. I really loved this book. A relative was one of the first to die of HIV/Aids here and I just hated to see the prejudice (in the story as I was too young to know what was going on around me). I ached for the Courtenay family.

This is my favourite book of all time. It is a terribly tragic and heartfelt book about a father’s love. The world was against his son from the day he was born but their love for one another was incredible to read. I don’t think I’ve cried so much. Prepare for heartbreak in this novel.

Beautifully written!
Make sure you are a box of tissues whilst reading.
Heartbreaking!

Oh, boy. Oh, man. Buckle up, kiddos, because we are going in.

The first thing I'd like to delineate before I launch into what may turn out to be a rather angry review of this book is that I have so much sympathy for this story. It's a terrible thing to go through, as a parent, a partner, a victim of the virus, all of it- it's awful. I can't even begin to fathom the pain that it must have thrown into the hearts of so many people. I'd also like to stipulate that my stars are here for Damon and his partner- I found their stories far more poignant and interesting than the remaining 400-ish pages of the book. Now, onto the rest of the review.

Bryce Courtenay is not a good man. I could see this fairly evidently when he returned home late, drunk as a skunk, thinking about how much he'd like to bang his wife while his son is near to death in the next room due to a bruise that he chose to ignore because 'Oh, his crying stopped for five minutes'. I'm not saying parents don't make mistakes, but I think that thinking about sex in the midst of a crisis while your wife bawls her eyes out shows exactly what kind of person you are. To then later DEFER to a doctor because he said that 'Your wife shouldn't see her son like this' and hide things from her is, quite frankly, disgusting. I don't care how paternalistic a hospital is, I care that you decided to actively lie to her- and then do that again in respect to your son having a psychotic episode. How disgusting. How shameful. To exclude the woman that you married on equal terms for the sole sake of what? Not worrying her? Do you know how much fear and worry the not knowing creates? Shame on you.

The next issue I take is the bizarre homophobic asides that Courtenay decides to embark on in the middle of the book. Not just once, but about three, four times. One of those may have been from his wife. To delineate 'medically-acquired AIDS' as a somehow 'purer' variant of the virus that is more innocent is cowardly and frustrating, especially as Courtenay puts forward the claim that he's vanquishing misinformation. No, mate, you're adding to it. LGBT+ people in Australia still cannot donate blood, no matter the circumstances, no matter abstinence, no matter single partners for the whole of their lives, no matter anything. If you've ever had a sexual encounter with someone who identifies as gay, you can't donate blood. Courtenay thinks this is brilliant and wonderful, not realising just how much the queer community could contribute to the blood supply. Even worse- the heterosexual community has far higher rates of HIV and has since the 90s, which is when this book was written. Tell me, what is there to gain from using the death of your son to be a homophobic twat? Where does that benefit you? Also, if you, a straight man, ever use the term 'the gays' again, I will physically manifest in your home.

To add onto that point, I cannot believe that the other implication you raised about the queer community was the prevalence of, what you call, 'butt-rustlers'. As a straight man, in the 1990s, you choose to use homophobic terms that were designed to keep people closeted and discriminated against. This, THIS, is why I cannot stomach what should have been a poignant story. Well, this and some other things.

And on the 'other things' point, how misogynistic can you get? In the midst of your son's psychotic break, while he struggles with the concept of reality, Bryce sits there and talks about how dumpy and frumpy the doctor he eventually meets is. The male doctors receive only insults to their intelligence- the female doctors, however, it's a free game to be able to criticise exactly how they look. How can you ever CONSIDER looks when you're scared to death for your son? How dare you? And then the racism, oy. Don't even get me started. The same critique applies.

I think what really set my teeth on edge was the way that Bryce ended up treating Damon too. In the midst of a bleed, Damon declares that he will die soon anyway. The thing is, he's right. He is 100% correct, and instead of stepping up to the plate and acting like a real parent who takes the care perspective and tells his son yes, he will die, but that's okay, and life is to live to the fullest now, whilst he still can. Instead, Bryce decides to scream in his face that he's a bastard. It was horrible to read. I know that you can snap at your children, but to take them and do that at their most vulnerable point while they're recovering from a particularly bad bleed? How can you do that? Then try to justify yourself? I can't. I simply cannot fathom it.

The worst of all this is that this book is non-fiction. Sure, nobody's perfect, but there's surely a happy medium here. But no, Bryce Courtenay isn't a fictitious character, but a real-life man in his full glory. You could've focused this story on love, as Damon asked you to do. But was that what you chose? No, you chose to soapbox your different forms of hatred just to get your point across. Damon's story deserved to be told in the best way, not sugar-coated, but certainly not this poisonous diatribe that you put to paper. There's a reality here, a horrible one, that sometimes blood transfusions go wrong, that haemophilia is a terrifying illness, that AIDS is a dark reality, that being a parent facing the medical system on a constant basis is hard and frustrating, that loss is difficult. However, the reality is not the fact that you thought the doctor who treated your son's mania looked a little too frumpy for your liking. Perhaps Courtenay's ego should have stepped aside for Damon's story to tell itself, but apparently that was too much to ask.

An admittedly poignant story told in a very bloated fashion. I found myself skipping a lot of digressions and trivia. This is not of course a commentary on the life, pain and experiences the family went through, which are touching in an exceptional way. The amount of medical malpractice they went through is infuriating and saddening. For myself, I simply prefer more conciseness and deliberate focus when it comes to carving a path or a perspective through a story. Depositing everything into a huge mass comes across as tedious sometimes. From a reader's perspective, selective detail would have been more powerful, I think, emphasizing the craftsmanship of the novel over completeness. But of course the book was written first and foremost as the fulfillment of a promise and secondly as a necessary act of memory for the author. Those things make including every detail important too.

It’s rare that a book will reduce me to tears, but this one did. Deeply personal and utterly heartbreaking Courtenay details the life of his youngest son Damon who unfortunately as a haemophiliac would end up dying of HIV/AIDS as a result of a blood transfusion and the struggle against the prejudiced society of the 1980s when it was marked as a disease that only occurred in homosexual men. This is a powerful story about a life lost too soon and the healing power that love can bring

Damn. This book. )':

I'm so glad I chose to listen to it.

Such a tragic and heartbreaking story about Bryce Courteney’s Son Damon who was born with haemophilia and then tragically contracts AIDS via the very thing that is used to save his life ie blood transfusions. It is the story of his life told by various family members and Damon’s father throughout the book. At times funny and light hearted and others moments poignant and sad and sometimes it left me so angry with the medical system and how he was treated. Make sure you have tissues ready.

Great book. Really enjoyed the story

This was a hard one to read. It's very confronting. What a terrible disease!

All I knew about hemophilia was that Queen Victoria spread it by marrying off her children to pretty much all the crowned heads of Europe and practically killed them all off!