Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was fascinated by the premise of this book, and initially enthralled with the story. As more and more of the truth of what was going on and how they'd all ended up where they were was revealed to the protagonist, however, my feeling of disgust with this story, its characters, and the author grew. By the time I had finished the book, only sheer stubbornness was keeping me reading, and my final thought is that the best thing about this book is that I didn't pay for it. First, the good: I found the premise deeply fascinating. I'm a lifelong fan of horror, especially the intimate horror of family dysfunction, and this book certainly delivers on that front. The story opens with the narrator's older sister giving birth, which immediately sets up a sense of dissonance between the narrator's blithe acceptance of what is, to him, a perfectly normal life - he is, after all, ten years old and doesn't understand how pregnancy happens - and the reader's horror and disgust at knowing that, since the sister isn't allowed to leave and no one else is allowed in, her baby must have been conceived through incestuous rape. Using a young boy who was born into this situation and has never known anything else allows the writer to create many instances of this dissonance and thus subtly weave a truly horrifying atmosphere. The narrator accepts every aspect of his life as normal, and shows us many things that we, as adult readers, understand to be wrong, while he has no idea what's going on. Similarly to his sister's pregnancy, we are told that his older brother routinely masturbates in the bed above his in their shared room, except that the narrator doesn't understand that's what his brother is doing. We do, however. The abuse dynamics among the family are quite believable as well. The sister is the family scapegoat, blamed for all that has befallen them - despite it having been the parents' choice to cloister themselves away - and punished much more severely than any of her siblings. The father is controlling and harsh. The children are pitted against each other to keep them from becoming allies against their controlling, abusive parents. As time goes on, the family's secrets come to light, and this is where the bad begins. Years ago, the older sister accidentally caused her brother to suffer a severe head injury from falling down the stairs, and then covered up what had happened rather than getting him immediate medical help. Because of this mistake - a terrible mistake to have made, certainly - she is held responsible for everything else that happens. She is extravagantly punished and regarded by both her parents and the narrative itself as evil. Throughout the story, she is presented not as a young woman who made a terrible mistake as a child and has since suffered ongoing sexual and emotional abuse as a punishment for that mistake, who is justifiably angry with her abusers and who is trying to escape, but as a malicious, manipulative, hateful person. The narrative itself oozes with contempt for her. The book's treatment of the disabled brother is grotesque. Much attention is paid to his sexuality, and that sexuality is presented exclusively as disgusting, violent, and animalistic. At one point, in the backstory portion of the book, a girl in the town goes missing; it is later discovered that the disabled brother found her washed up on the shore and continuously raped her while she was dying and then after she was dead, because he was simply too disabled to understand that she was hurt or needed help or that it was wrong to rape her. As I mentioned earlier, he publicly masturbates above the narrator in bed, and it is implied he doesn't understand he shouldn't do this. The sister tries to manipulate the narrator into believing their father impregnated her and continues to abuse her, but it's revealed that it's actually the disabled brother who has been abusing her. (This is treated as another hateful act on the part of the sister; no attention is given to the fact that while her father might not have raped her himself, he allowed her brother to rape and impregnate her.) 'Animalistic' describes the disabled brother to a T. He is not treated as a person, but rather as a beast in the body of a human. He doesn't have a personality aside from the stereotypes the author believes of mentally disabled people. He doesn't have a role in the story except to be disgusting and offputting. His disability is explicitly linked to his various sexual offences, making it quite clear that the author himself must believe that the mentally disabled are beasts ruled entirely by their urges and lack even the ability to understand right or wrong on any level. The treatment of the older sister is similarly grotesque. As I mentioned before, there is no sympathy extended to her by the narrative for the abuse she has suffered. She's presented as cold and hatefully manipulative, delighting in the downfall of her family, but even when we as the readers fully understand why that is, the narrative still frames her actions as wrong and her motivations as evil. More sympathy and care are given to the child she was forced to birth, not to mention the brother whose abuse impregnated her, than to her. Ultimately, everyone in the book dies except for the narrator and his infant brother-nephew. It is a terribly unsatisfying ending, and a clear demonstration that the narrative values the life of this infant - borne of incestuous rape - over the life of the young woman who was abused to bring him into the world. The concept of this book was interesting, and some aspects of it were well executed. However, the treatment of the sister was nothing short of grossly misogynistic, the treatment of the disabled brother made it clear the author views the mentally disabled as subhuman, and the constant refrain of sexual abuse and assault felt less like an attempt to address the sickening reality of this type of abuse and its effect on families and more like sheer voyeurism. The victim of the abuse was presented as hateful and deserving of it, the perpetrator as an animal who didn't even understand what he was doing. All in all, months after I read this book, I am still disgusted by it. Not only are such portrayals of abuse and disability deeply offensive, they're also just lazy. It's clear the author didn't care to do any research and simply relied on tired stereotypes. The sheer contempt for both women and the disabled that oozes from this book made reading it as a disabled woman a hugely unpleasant experience. I would give this zero stars if I could, and I will never read another work by this author.