I actually have the new, paperback copy but this was the first cover I found online.
This book blew me away. I had been waiting to read it for a while and was finally bought it a while ago and then read it in one night (I didn't have time to post the review). I was shocked, broken hearted, amazed, and crying. This was a roller coaster of emotion.
This book blew me away. I had been waiting to read it for a while and was finally bought it a while ago and then read it in one night (I didn't have time to post the review). I was shocked, broken hearted, amazed, and crying. This was a roller coaster of emotion.
Summary:
"Alice" isn't her real name, it's the name Ray gave her. To everyone else at the apartment complex and church Ray is her father. Ray is actually a pedophile who kidnapped when she was ten at a school field trip to an aquarium. She's now fifteen and maturing, which Ray doesn't like and wishes she'd stay a little girl forever, while Alice just wants to be dead. She's sick of the rape and abuse she's been going through for years and yet she's almost compleely emotionless. She's nothing more than a washed out and bleak creature we call a girl. Really she's nothing more than a living dead girl (synonym: wintergirl), in between alive and dead, usually waiting to die. The little hope she has is that she can go home to her family, even though Ray threatens to kill them all before her eyes. Because of this she does whatever he says. She only eats what he says she can eat and only says what he says she should do. She tried to escape once and it didn't work. She's tried suffocating herself and it didn't work. To her, nothing will work.
And then one day Ray says they should get a new girl and she agrees. She no longer cares what happens to that girl, that girl isn't her. She can be free. That girl isn't her. I found this horrifying but I understood it. It was awful and I truly understood then how bad it was because she'll let it happen to someone else, but not to her.
The rape, the starvation, the kidnapping, everything broke my heart. To think this actually happens is terrible and that it could be happening to anyone but we don't realize it. When I finished reading this book I didn't know what to think. To sum it up it gets five stars, but that doesn't matter. Just read it. I don't want to give too much away (that's why the review is so short).
One last thing is that though people are acknoledged in this book, it's dedicated to no one. If you wrote something like this, would you dedicate it to someone? Anyone, whether a victim such as the real Alices of the world, or someone important to you? Or would it be too much?
