A Child Called "It" - by Dave Pelzer

Billed as "the extraordinary inspirational story", I can't say I found it very inspirational. I was almost finished with the book before I even realized that the author was actually the child involved in this story - one of the worst cases of child abuse in the history of the state of California.

The book was almost too easy to read for the subject matter; I finished it in about 2 hours. I actually felt really detached from the child and never really felt connected to him as the story was told, which made me feel as if some other third party was relaying the story and telling it as if it was from the perspective of the child. Even the author's notes, when I look back at them, refer to himself as "the child" or "the boy", as if he were referring to someone other than himself. Despite the feeling of detachment, the story was compelling, making you want to keep reading to find out what was going to happen to the boy, even though you already knew.

Perhaps he truly has managed to move past all that happened to him as a child, but those types of comments lead me to believe that there is large part of him that still does not really connect all that happened to him as a child and looking back sees it as having happened to someone else, or a story that he was told. Perhaps that is really all that has kept him from repeating the errors of his own mother and allowed him to turn into a productive citizen and good father.

The book covers the childhood (from age 4 to 12) of a boy from what seemed like a normal home, and in the beginning it was normal. But, something happened along the way and his mother turned to alcohol and began to take out all of her anger on him. Despite having 4 siblings, David took all of the abuse. While it was his Mother who did the abusing, his Father simply stood by and allowed it to happen, often watching it. He let his son know that he wasn't happy about it, but he never did anything to stop it. His Father finally left the home and left David in it to continue to receive the wrath of his Mother, a wrath that only grew worse when his Father was not there. From withholding food, to forcing David to sleep on a cot in the cold basement garage, to leaving him locked in a small bathroom with a bucket of ammonia mixed with bleach, she thrived in finding new ways to "punish" David for her imagined infractions. For years she managed to convince anyone who questioned his bruises or strange actions that there was just something wrong with him, but eventually someone finally gained enough of David's trust for him to admit what had been going on so that they could rescue him from it.

The book leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and I can only guess that perhaps they are answered in his later books, as he says this is the first of a trilogy about his life. I can only hope that his Mother was finally punished once the truth came out. Perhaps the next book explains what happened to him when he was removed from the home (a fact that actually opens this book). The biggest question is one that probably won't be answered and that is how a parent (his Father) could watch another commit such heinous acts and not stop them, not remove the child from the home, when he himself left.