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Book Review: Every Other Weekend by Anthony J. Mohr

ByMary Jones

Mar 10, 2025 ##Identity, #book review, #dailyprompt, #Divorce, #Family, #featured, #Reader Review, #resilience, #the chrysalis brew project
Cover of "Every Other Weekend" by Anthony J. Mohr, featuring the BRW Seal of Excellence and details about coming of age with two different dads.

What if growing up were not a straightforward journey, but a game of ping-pong played across two households, with two very different men holding the paddles? In Every Other Weekend, Anthony J. Mohr crafts a memoir that defies the typical coming-of-age narrative—not by sensationalizing the fractures of a broken family, but by turning the act of toggling between two fathers into a quiet, profound study of what it means to be made of two halves.

Review

How many children of divorce can name the exact weekend when their childhood began to split into alternating segments? How many can recall not only the sting of separation but the peculiar privilege of living two parallel lives at once—one ruled by Hollywood’s flickering glitz, the other by the steady hum of entrepreneurship? The book’s title might suggest a predictable rhythm, but Mohr’s life unfolded in a far more irregular cadence—each weekend bringing new lessons in love, loss, and the often-unseen labor of becoming whole.

Set against the golden light of mid-century Los Angeles—a city in the throes of both Cold War anxiety and post-war optimism—Mohr’s story walks the fault lines of the American Dream. His father, Gerald Mohr, was the kind of man who could light a cigarette and seduce an entire room—his baritone voice gracing hundreds of radio dramas, from The Adventures of Philip Marlowe to Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre. His stepfather, Stanley Dashew, was a self-made tycoon who helped pioneer the credit card industry—a different kind of magician, conjuring fortunes from numbers and plastic. Between them stood a boy who grew into a man, bearing witness to two distinct models of masculinity: one all charm and chaos, the other discipline and order. Which blueprint would he follow? Could he stitch the best parts of both into something entirely his own?

There’s an old African proverb that says, When the elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. Yet in Mohr’s memoir, the child caught between two towering personalities does not merely endure—he observes, absorbs, and ultimately transcends. His writing is not a courtroom indictment of flawed fathers but a study in empathy, as precise and fair-minded as the judgments he would one day deliver from the bench as a Superior Court judge. The book asks an uncomfortable but necessary question: What if both fathers were right, and both were wrong?

Mohr’s prose is subtle, rarely raising its voice, but it carries the kind of quiet authority that sneaks up on you. His descriptions of 1950s and ’60s Los Angeles ripple with the warm haze of memory—whether he’s recalling the postwar optimism of Invasion USA or the unspeakable aftermath of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination at the Ambassador Hotel, where his father stood among the stunned crowd. His eye for detail is surgical, yet there’s an undercurrent of longing beneath the precision—an ache that lingers in the spaces between fathers and sons, between what was given and what was withheld.

The memoir’s most profound triumph is its refusal to settle on a villain or a hero. Gerald Mohr’s charm flickers with self-destruction; Stanley Dashew’s success is tinged with emotional distance. One father teaches his son to tell a joke with perfect timing—though never how to pay a bill on time. The other builds an empire on risk and resilience—yet struggles to offer warmth without condition. Mohr tackles these contradictions not with bitterness, but with the measured curiosity of someone who has learned to hold two truths at once.

It would be easy to cast Every Other Weekend as a portrait of fractured families—a nostalgia-soaked meditation on what the divorce boom did to American childhoods before it became commonplace. But that would miss the larger point. This is not just a story of what divorce takes away—it’s a story of what it leaves behind: the shards of different lives that a child must gather, examine, and reshape into a self. How many memoirs dare to suggest that love—even in its most flawed, fragmented forms—can still do its quiet work across broken weekends and tangled family trees?

Some books invite you to marvel at how extraordinary a life has been. This one invites you to marvel at how ordinary life can be—and how extraordinary that ordinariness becomes when rendered with compassion and care.

If there’s a single passage that distills the memoir’s soul, it’s Mohr’s reflection on his two fathers: “I didn’t study my fathers. I watched them in their two worlds, neither of which I could inhabit completely.” How many children—of divorce or otherwise—carry that same secret? The sense of never fully belonging to either parent’s world, yet quietly learning from both?

Readers expecting a scandalous Hollywood tell-all will be disappointed. Those seeking a neatly resolved emotional arc may also walk away wanting. But readers who understand that most lives unfold not in neat arcs but in loops, stumbles, and the steady accumulation of half-remembered Sundays will find something rare here: a memoir that trusts the reader to linger in uncertainty without demanding easy answers.

In its own understated way, Every Other Weekend serves as a quiet counterpoint to the louder, more self-aggrandizing memoirs crowding the shelves. It is a reminder that coming-of-age is not always about rebellion or reinvention—it is often about learning to reconcile. Mohr’s contribution to the genre is not just his finely tuned prose, but his moral clarity—the sense that fairness, in both life and literature, matters more than spectacle.

Perhaps the greatest compliment one could give this book is that it feels like a story a judge would tell—not in a closing argument, but in the chambers where only the most important conversations happen. It is a love letter not only to two imperfect fathers but to the hard, necessary work of seeing people as they truly are—whole, fallible, and worthy of understanding.

By the time the final page is turned, the title itself takes on new resonance. This is not just a memoir about the rhythm of a divided childhood—it is a meditation on the weekends that make us, the lives that shape us, and the quiet grace of learning how to hold two different worlds in the same heart.

About the Author

A smiling portrait of a middle-aged judge wearing a black robe and white shirt, with gray hair and a friendly expression.

Anthony J. Mohr served as a judge on the Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles, for twenty-six years and as a judge pro tem on the California Court of Appeal. A Harvard ALI fellow, he is a senior editor of the Harvard ALI Social Impact Review. His stories and essays have earned five Pushcart Prize nominations. He has contributed to Evening Street Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Hippocampus Magazine, and Under the Sun.

Book Details

  • Title: Every Other Weekend
  • Author: Anthony J. Mohr
  • Genre(s): Non-Fiction
  • Sub-genre(s): Memoir, Coming of Age
  • Theme(s): Family, Divorce, Identity, Resilience
  • Minimum Audience Age: 14+ (due to mature themes like divorce, complex family dynamics, and historical political events)
  • Main language used in the text: English

Book Themes

(Note: 0=none, 1=a few, 2=considerable, 3=pronounced, 4=excessive)

  • Sexual themes: 3 – Candid but not gratuitous, often reflecting father’s attitudes.
  • Religious themes: 1 – Only incidental, with no dominant spiritual reflections.
  • Violence, self-harm, etc.: 2 – Physical altercations and emotional abuse depicted with restraint.
  • Crude language, expletives, swearing, etc.: 3 – Occasional but realistic, particularly in dialogue.
  • Other adult themes: 3 – Divorce, infidelity, and mental health struggles explored thoughtfully.

Rating

  • Content: 5
  • Writing Style & Visual Presentation: 5
  • Appeal to Target Audience: 5
  • Uniqueness: 5
  • Editing: 4.5 rounded off to 5
  • Other Factors: 5
  • Overall Average Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars

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