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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
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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