This is a very disturbing book: very disturbing indeed. We have to read it with the view that everything that Pelzer tells us is true.

This is the first book in a trilogy: this book is concerned with his early life.

David's life starts out normally but after a few years it takes a turn not just for the worse but for the appallngly, obscenely worse. David is seriously, physically abused on a daily basis for the next seven years or so.

The attack that had me most horrified was the one where David is on holiday with his family and he has become trapped with his mother as his father and brothers play elsewhere. David has one of his baby brother's soiled nappies slapped on his face and his mother tells him to eat the shit that's on it. He refuses, and she attacks him again: she keeps coming at him. He is small and helpless. He is saved when the rest of the family returns but the taste and the smell stays with him.

David is beaten and bullied almost at will by his mother as his father stands by: apparently helpless, certainly not helping. David deserves an explanation from his father as to why he refused to help him. Moreover, David deserves an apology from his father for his own abject failure.

One of the weapons his mother uses against David is to stop feeding him: this she does on a significant scale. More than that, once David has learned to steal food and eat it whilst he's at school and she clearly sees that he's thriving, she forces him to regurgitate what he might have eaten when he gets home. She might make him re eat it sometimes, depending on her mood.

David is rescued at the end of the book; but he has suffered such an appalling series of attacks. He has been made the butt of everyone's jokes and jibes, he's been starved almost to death, he has lived in the most soul destroying fear and he did all of this when he was a small child.

How can someone so small survive such an onslaught? How has David come through the things he has described? Maybe we will learn his secrets in the following two books; but he has my admiration. Knowing that abused children usually go on to become abusing parents, we can only read with admiration the snippets we learn about David's relationship with his own children.

There are many, many children who suffer in the way that David has but they don't survive their childhood. There are children who suffer in the way that David has and they become monsters themselves.

Let David's story be a lesson for us all: let anyone who even thinks of behaving anything like this, read this book and then seek help. Society needs our violent parents to seek help.

I would like to hear the mother's story; and the father's story and his brothers' story.

This is a short book that doesn't take much reading: it deserves to be read by all parents. It is an 'X' rated read, though, so don't let very young children get hold of it.

 

Duncan Williamson
18 January 2003