Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life

by Sandra Beasley

[Angie]

As someone with a ton of allergies, including several food allergies, I was very interested in this memoir about someone who has it worse off than me. In Don't Kill the Birthday Girl, Sandra takes us through all of the ways that food allergies have affected her, her life, and the lives of those around her. She covers everything from the actual reactions themselves and how she has to carefully choose her foods to how it affected her family and friends, and even her fears (and hopes) for the future. Food allergies are not just about what you can or cannot put in your mouth, they have ways of causing problems in other areas of life as well.

Don't Kill the Birthday Girl was extremely informative and chock full of facts that I didn't know and not just about food and food allergies. I definitely did learn a lot reading it. Now I know where allergies come from, and why almost all of mine only result in hives and some swelling rather than full blown anaphylaxis. Also asthma tends to go hand-in-hand with allergies, something I luckily grew out of, even though I seem to get more allergies the older I get. There's also some interesting stuff about food in wedding traditions, which while I felt she went on too long about, was still interesting.

That is my one complaint about Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: the author goes off on several tangents. These sections were suppose to serve as context for the chapter, but a few times she started giving information that wasn't relevant or even that interesting. I don't think we needed Colonel Sanders' life story when discussing how allergies are the bane of secret recipes. The medical chapter was particularly dense and I don't think it added much to her narrative other than a lot of technical terms that would will just go right over the average reader's head.

I did enjoy Don't Kill the Birthday Girl. It's a subject that I'm quite interested in and I felt like I learned a lot. It also gave me some things to think about that I hadn't even considered before in regards to allergies. Overall, I do think this was a bit on the negative side. Food allergies are serious and can be deadly, but a lot of the authors personal anecdotes are of the "woe is me" variety, although she does balance some of it out with humor. There is one particularly positive story which shows that food allergies don't have to hold you back when trying something new, but I do wish there had been more like that rather than "I was hopeful, but then I had a bad reaction." Rinse. Repeat.

Read more of my reviews at Pinkindle Reads & Reviews.