While the incidence* of childhood sexual abuse continues to grow, thankfully there are survivors like Rachel Thompson who have conquered the horror.
In Broken Places: A Memoir of Abuse, Thompson conveys the facts and feelings of being an 11-year-old at the hands of a trusted neighbor who turns out to be a pedophile. The book dutifully begins with a “Trigger Warning,” notifying abuse survivors that the subject matter could be painfully harsh.
Through poems, prose, and reflective pieces written with candor and literary charm, she shares how she coped: retreating to her room surrounding herself with books and music, and feeding her already introverted personality. She rarely went out except to earn good grades or do chores. “Because if I did, I faced the glaring, accusatory stares of his wife and children—as if I were the one who committed such ghastly crimes.” Later, she drank, got high, and considered suicide.
Not until her thirties, depressed, anxious, and following the birth of a daughter, Thompson sought therapy for the first time after a doctor’s visit left her with a PTSD diagnosis and a prescription for an anti-depressant. Therapy was “life-changing,” leading her to the realization that she, not her abuser, was in the driver’s seat of her recovery. “I love, I breathe, I work, I write, I live. What happened does not stop me.”
Today, in her fifties, she is an advocate for sexual abuse survivors and runs the Twitter chat #SexAbuseChat. She owns a social media and book marketing company and previously wrote the essay collection Broken Pieces, A Walk In The Snark and the more humorous The Mancode: Exposed.
A talented writer with a journalism degree, Thompson adeptly plays with point of view employing both first person singular (“I”) to convey her experiences, and first person plural (“We”), perhaps to denote a kinship among survivors: “We are no longer whole—we are bits of cells made up of dread, and fear, and shame. We speak in terms that separate us from ourselves because even now, all these many years later, we don’t want to own what happened.”
Also, she sneaks in literary gems, like alliteration: “The bad thing takes your brain hostage, fills it with the detritus of denial, becomes dead leaves waiting for the deep scratch of the rake.”
The only weakness of Broken Places is its arrangement, as it seems like a random assortment rather than an intentioned story. Perhaps this organization, or lack thereof, speaks to the uncertainty Thompson faced during a time in her life that was more about second-guessing and doubting rather than chasing butterflies and riding bikes like little girls that age should be doing.
Most importantly, the book is recommended reading for adults, college students, and youngsters alike as it serves as the impetus for a much-needed culture shift—telling children that it’s okay to report abuse and for grown-ups to hear them.
Broken Places: A Memoir of Abuse by Rachel Thompson won 1st Place in the CIBAs 2017 JOURNEY Awards for Memoir.
*1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse, according to the National Center for Victims of Crime.
Secondly, the Secular Revolution with its scientific enlightenment began to take hold in the mid-1700s as an accepted way to see and understand the Universe and our place within it. For the first time in recorded human history, the cultural concepts of religious dominance and doctrine were being challenged. The 1750s brought us the Age of Enlightenment.
Next, the first phase of the Industrial Revolution (1750 – 1914) was brought about by the harnessing of the energy of coal and steam rather than biomass energy (humans and animal muscle power). This lead to mass migrations of humans escaping famine, poverty, and intolerance to take place for the first time in history. Railroads and trains, and steamships, as well as sailing ships with more dependable navigational tools such as the marine chronometer (1748) that allowed for safer passage across the oceans made the migrations possible.
The beloved Chaucer Awards remain, but have metamorphosed into the Pre-1750 Historical Fiction awards. For those authors whose works are on the cusp of 1750 and who need to decide which contest to enter, the Chaucer Awards or the Goethe Awards, we suggest you determine if your work is influenced by the markers of the Industrial Revolution or if it is more to the medieval times and mores to decide which contest to enter–the Chaucer Awards (pre-1750) or the Goethe Awards (post 1750).
Our Chaucer Awards are the Chanticleer Reviews search for the best Early Period (pre-1750) Historical Fiction books of 2016!
Our Goethe Awards are the Chanticleer Reviews search for the best Late Period (post-1750) Historical Fiction books of 2016!
Whoa! That’s right. It is just that the big guys don’t pay us in cash or Paypal. They pay us in-kind with advertising, promotional considerations, press releases, having Chanticleer Reviews name appear on covers of thousands and thousands of books, helping us build relationships with the all important book distributors, and helping us (Chanticleer Reviews) to earn prestige among the traditional publishing houses. How much would we have to pay for this type of priceless promotion? I can’t even think about the number of zeros that would follow the dollar sign. Conversely, how much would we have to charge authors and smaller publishers who do not have staff and contractors to run the p/r machine to match the type of compensation that the big guys offer with each ARC that we receive from them in the mail or from Net Galley?
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