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Reviewed by Asher Syed for Readers' Favorite
Make Up Your Mind, What Do You Want? by R.A. Dillow shares the life of Dillow's father, Donald, a Minnesota farm boy who learns adulthood through paid work after a childhood where major lessons were left unsaid. Raised as one of nine children on a remote dairy farm, Donald grows up hearing that he is “just supposed to know,” a phrase that later shapes how he raises his own children. His daughter frames his life through one repeated habit: Donald talks before his children have to guess. His advice returns to a single demand: decide the life you want before trouble decides for you. In this biography, blunt fatherly counsel becomes a record of how one man turned memory into protection for the family he meant to prepare for the larger world ahead.
R.A. Dillow’s Make Up Your Mind, What Do You Want? praises Donald, her father, through advice tested across a full country life with plainspoken force. The memoir matters now because it treats adulthood as teachable conduct. Donald’s family retires debt-free after years of saving old wire for use again, then his knee pads and arthritis bee stings turn health into household instruction. His legacy is cemented in family history because he called his four grown children gold, then accepted that his farm dream counted after losing Minnesota dairy land, which had altered his farming life for years. The writing style, plainly intelligent, is also conversational and wonderfully accessible, since a lesson like two buckets of manure becomes a usable image for putting bitterness down while the author keeps Donald’s farm speech intact and loving. I recommend it to memoir readers who value a father’s rural work ethic translated into faith-shaped advice that makes inherited wisdom useful today.
