Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

THE THROWAWAY CHILDREN is not badly written, hence the two-star rating instead of just one star. But this book should come with a major warning: Only proceed if you want to be traumatized and depressed. I wish someone had warned me, so I wouldn't have the sick feeling this book has left me with. The story is that of two sisters in post-WWW-II England, whose selfish, callous widowed mother signs them over to the children's services because she chooses the abusive man who knocked her up over the two little girls he doesn't want to have around, marriage to and the dubious financial benefits of the violent alcoholic boyfriend being more important to dear mum than her daughters. Lovely beginning, and it only gets worse. **SPOILERS AHEAD** The girls are sent to a workhouse-like orphanage, subjected to harsh conditions and physical abuse. When it appears their grandmother's ineffectual efforts to get them back might bring to light the conditions at the orphanage, the director of the orphanage whisks them onto a ship bound for a sister orphanage in Australia. After a very brief time there, the girls are separated when the younger is adopted and torn away, literally, from her sister. At about the 55% point in the book, when the five-year-old is first sexually molested by her adoptive father, is when I wised up and stopped reading and just scanned a couple points throughout the rest of the book, enough to determine that the little girl eventually kills herself rather than be returned to her abuser. Apparently, the older sister does marry and does have a reunion with her grandmother and teenaged half-brother (who was orphaned after his father killed his mother), so I guess that qualifies as a "happy" ending, technically. I think that, for me, part of what was so awful about this story, aside from the relentless parade of bad things that happen to the two innocent young girls, was how throughout the book, decent people -- teachers, a police constable, neighbors, even to an extent their grandmother -- saw that conditions were bad *and did nothing* just walked away, often thinking how it would be hard to put it from their minds (apparently, not hard enough!) It was like, okay, as if what happens to the girls isn't awful enough, the author made it overwhelmingly depressing by showing that *no one* cared about others enough to bestir themselves on even these helpless children's behalf. Maybe that's more realistic than not -- I pray it's not -- but it makes for a disturbing reading experience that I wish I could erase from my memory. I strongly recommend that unless you enjoy reading about mistreated children, you avoid this book. I would have appreciated someone warning me before I wasted a couple hours on a book which has left me feeling terrible.