This book is the third in the series of books by David Pelzer about his life, trials and tribulations. David's story is that he is one of the three most abused children in the USA in living memory and the only one of the three to have survived the experience.

David's story is exceptionally tragic and the vast, vast majority of us who have no possible understanding of what David can have gone through can only sit in wonderment at how his life was so wretched for so long.

Nevertheless, I finished reading this book around three weeks ago but it has taken me until now to feel able to write this review: I read all three books fairly closely together and had no problem with the other two reviews. Maybe I was battle weary by the end of this book; but by the end of this third book my feelings for this issue had changed from when I first started reading the first book.

Clearly I have not been abused as David was and clearly I cannot sit in judgement on anyone in David's life, apart from his mother and father and anyone else who was complicit in the crimes that David suffered from. Still, I simply could not see why David effectively chased his father in the way that he did; and why he effectively chased his mother in the way that he did.

We learn a lot more about David and his adult and family life and his life in the armed forces. We learn about David's attempts to get some comfort from his parents. We also learn about David's first, failed, marriage.

David is a soul in torment but he seems largely to have come through his torment in lots of ways. He married in haste as far as we can tell and repented at some leisure: his side of the story makes for unpleasant reading but maybe there are issues that come from reading between the lines.

David forgave his father and although he didn't see much of him, he was with his father as he was dying and always said that he didn't blame his father for what happened to him. I have to say that I would have blamed him because of his absentee stance to David's problems. Still, David feels happy that he was with his father at the end and who am I to contradict the feelings that he had? Good for him: perhaps that makes David a stronger person than I am.

As far as David's mother is concerned, we just about get to the point where David meets his mother and even though she slaps him and slaps him hard at his father's funeral when she believes he has tried to cheat her of her inheritance from his father he wants both to forgive her and to get her to say sorry to him. He finds that his mother was abused by her own mother: thus justifying her own abuse of him? His mother says she would have killed him but couldn't think what she could have done to dispose of his body. He went back and each time he left with no answers and no apology. She died!

As the book wore on David's son and second wife come more to the fore. David's second wife came at him along the same lines as his first wife had done: she appeared out of the blue in some senses. He says he is happy and he tells us how she was a motivating and driving force for him: she helped him to move on with his life. David is devoted to his son and is doing everything in his power now to protect him and to bring him up free of all the worries, of anything like the worries, that he faced himself.

As an aside, I went to David's web site and was rather surprised to find that there is nothing there: a few platitudes and an address but no email address and no way of getting directly in contact with him. I found nothing on the web site that suggests an open personality and I found this unsettling: maybe the voyeur in me is driving me to find more but I don't deserve it!

David tells us from the very beginning of the first book that he has written his books as he remembered the stories in them and told those stories from the point of view of the person he was as he lived them. This is an interesting style and will explain some of the attitudes that I find odd: chasing his parents and looking for answers.

In the end two books would have sufficed and although David has now written at least two more books, I'm afraid I won't be reading them. I will finish by saying that just about everyone I know has read at least one of David's books; and that includes school children!

Read this book by all means but if you've read the previous two you may find yourself feeling as weary as I was.

 

Duncan Williamson
18 March 2003