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Ray’s debut novel presents the story of a young woman suffering years of abuse at the hands of a new woman in her father’s life.Jacynta Roth, who lost her mother to cancer just three years ago, has a unique perspective on her father’s new live-in girlfriend Irma: She once saw Irma violently abuse her own two sons. But her father, Ned, doesn’t believe it. Soon, Irma’s desire to control Ned’s six children turns into physical torment—with the bulk of the abuse directed toward the youngest, Jacynta. As the years pass, her other siblings leave or mysteriously disappear; for example, Ned’s claim that Jacynta’s older sister, Michelle, is staying with their grandmother is clearly a lie. Jacynta, however, continues to endure Irma’s torture, which includes kicks, hair-pulling and locking her outside in the freezing winter snow. Jacynta’s only chance of escape, it seems, is to run away—but because few people believe that she’s being abused, she fears that she’ll be sent right back. Ray’s novel is a harrowing portrayal of child abuse made even more unsettling by the fact that it’s a true story (with names changed). Readers will likely find it difficult to sympathize with any of the secondary characters: Ned is aware of Irma’s mistreatment but does very little to stop it, and others in a position to help the girl, such as social worker Claudette, seem incapable of doing so. There are instances of optimism, however, that offset the book’s bleak tone: Jacynta’s brother Adam supports his baby sister and calms her when she’s angry or upset; and, in one of the story’s most heartbreaking moments, a friend’s father treats Jacynta so well that she cries with happiness. Ray presents the story in present tense, so there’s no retrospection at the end to adequately wrap everything up; in fact, she leaves more than one of the siblings’ fates vague. But the bittersweet conclusion, which leaves Jacynta facing an unknown future, promises more stories about the young girl’s life.An inspiring, if often despondent, novel about one girl’s fortitude and perseverance.
None NonePub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1936954018
Page Count: 354
Publisher: JRayDesigns
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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