A troubling, fiercely brave account of one woman’s survival.
In her debut memoir, Bella divulges the decades of sexual abuse she endured at the hands of her father.
The author’s account opens with two letters: one to him, who she hopes will “feel pain greater than what I had to go through” when faced with God’s judgment; the other to her daughter, who gives her “something to live for.” As the narrative reveals, it’s taken Bella years to reach that point. She grew up in a small Bosnian village where her wealthy father was a widely respected builder. From a young age, however, Bella recognized her father’s womanizing and abusive ways. Yet these glimpses did not prepare her for the moment, at age 6, when her father first proposed a secret game of touching one another’s genitals. Soon, kissing, fondling, and performing oral sex became almost-daily occurrences. Though she found solace in activities like singing and studying the Bible, Bella also contended with a mother who blamed her for what was happening and a belief––inspired by her father’s threats––that permitting this sexual abuse would protect her younger sisters from the same fate. Her secret relationship with her father––whom she refers to as Bozo––was far from the only hardship she encountered. Her body remained traumatized, leaving her without a period until age 19; her attempts at healthy relationships either led her to more abusive men or to kind ones she could not trust; and her family remained in war-torn Bosnia until her hand was struck with a stray bullet. Bella’s unflinching litany of torments may be too overwhelming for some readers. Her tone rarely wavers from solemnity, but her commitment to honesty also yields some of the harrowing book’s most shocking, memorable moments, such as her wedding to her first husband: “I had black-and-white outfit to match my black eye that I got the night before.” The relentless bleakness of her writing also makes her sentimental passages––that survivors, for example, are never alone since “God is with you”––feel earned and never like platitudes.
A troubling, fiercely brave account of one woman’s survival.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5043-0045-2
Page Count: 286
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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