A brief, disturbing remembrance of abuse and faith.
Debut author Lee describes how God delivered her from an abusive relationship in this Christian-themed memoir.
When the author was 15, she sneaked out of her grandparents’ house and went to a club with friends. There, she met 19-year-old Daniel (not this real name): “He was very good looking, dressed in white slacks, a white jacket and that sparkling white diamond tie!” The author says that she’d already endured physical, sexual, and verbal abuse during her childhood, and Daniel exploited her vulnerability. She immediately moved in with him, beginning a 13-year relationship that was characterized by constant horror. After two months, Daniel relocated Lee to a small town, where he kept her locked in a trailer. She was let out once a day to bathe, she says, and not allowed to talk to anyone. She writes that he raped her repeatedly and got her pregnant; she was briefly rescued by her mother, but after the baby was born, the author and Daniel moved to a new apartment. It was a long time before Lee finally found the strength to escape her abuser for good, she says, and she credits it to her eventual discovery of and faith in God and Jesus Christ. Interspersed with her account, the author provides Bible verses with short explanations of how they related to her situation and how readers might apply them to their own lives. Lee writes in a searing prose style that captures her strong emotions every step of the way, as when Daniel locks her in the trailer: “I had been homeless before Daniel, I had been molested before Daniel, I had been raped before Daniel, I had been abused before Daniel, I had been abandoned before Daniel...but in all that, never had I felt so trapped as I did right at that moment.” The book is fewer than 60 pages long, and its account is rather skeletal, with many details left out. It seems as if it’s intended to be read a sort of simplified parable, showing how the author suffered before turning to God. Readers may not draw the same theological conclusions from Lee’s experiences, but they’ll find them to be harrowing, nonetheless.
A brief, disturbing remembrance of abuse and faith.Pub Date: March 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-973622-22-2
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Worthwhile reference stuffed with facts and illustrations.
A compendium of charts, time lines, lists and illustrations to accompany study of the Bible.
This visually appealing resource provides a wide array of illustrative and textually concise references, beginning with three sets of charts covering the Bible as a whole, the Old Testament and the New Testament. These charts cover such topics as biblical weights and measures, feasts and holidays and the 12 disciples. Most of the charts use a variety of illustrative techniques to convey lessons and provide visual interest. A worthwhile example is “How We Got the Bible,” which provides a time line of translation history, comparisons of canons among faiths and portraits of important figures in biblical translation, such as Jerome and John Wycliffe. The book then presents a section of maps, followed by diagrams to conceptualize such structures as Noah’s Ark and Solomon’s Temple. Finally, a section on Christianity, cults and other religions describes key aspects of history and doctrine for certain Christian sects and other faith traditions. Overall, the authors take a traditionalist, conservative approach. For instance, they list Moses as the author of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) without making mention of claims to the contrary. When comparing various Christian sects and world religions, the emphasis is on doctrine and orthodox theology. Some chapters, however, may not completely align with the needs of Catholic and Orthodox churches. But the authors’ leanings are muted enough and do not detract from the work’s usefulness. As a resource, it’s well organized, inviting and visually stimulating. Even the most seasoned reader will learn something while browsing.
Worthwhile reference stuffed with facts and illustrations.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 978-1-5963-6022-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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