Jaycee Dugard

Jaycee Dugard is a remarkable young woman, a survivor who has come through an unthinkable ordeal and maintained a positive spirit. She's also writing from the point of view of someone whose social and academic education was entirely lacking so it's a naive and simply told story with no literary pretensions. Having basically brought herself up, because two criminal rapists really were not role models, it's amazing how coherent and comprehensible her story is. It's even fairly easy to follow the sequence of events from her kidnapping at age eleven until shortly after she gave birth to her second child by her pedophile abuser at age 17. (She never had any kind of medical care, including prenatal or obstetrical/midwife care, or dental care either; her survival is... well, things could have gone so very wrong in so many ways.) After that, apparently she wasn't subject to her captor Philiip's sexual frenzies: perhaps she aged-out. We're told a little about how she was required to home school the children and how they were told that Nancy, her female jailor, was their mother and she was their sister. But despite the fact that they were imprisoned in the same backyard, we hardly hear any more about them. The author may be trying to protect their privacy, but the result is that the last twelve years of her captivity are basically an untold story, a blank book which she fills as best she can with interminable stories of the cats she was allowed to nurture. By this stage of her imprisonment, she was allowed to keep a journal about her pets. There's an entire "baby book" about a cat, reprinted verbatim, which if I recall correctly she was in her twenties when she wrote it; it reads like the work of a junior high student. And then she ventured, with circumspect language, to express a few thoughts about her life in captivity. Perhaps she felt that her oppressors may have been figuratively or literally looking over her shoulder. When she wrote a list of ten best things in her life that made her happy at that time, chillingly her daughters didn't make it to the list. Perhaps that was wise, given what happened to most of her pets when she became attached (usually disappearance, nothing graphic).

So that's the structure of the book. Six years of her experiences as an abused child prisoner and two childbirths, twelve years of not saying much about what happened except to pets, and finally the rescue followed by reintegrating into normal life (this part extremely confusing, perhaps because of her trying to preserve the children's privacy, but I could get no idea of all of their living situation or relationship to her birth family either in terms of interaction or whether they lived in the next town or hours away), and equine therapy.

It's a worthy book and I'm sure it was valuable to her therapy. I don't regret reading it, but there's really no point in keeping it on the shelf. By my criteria for awarding stars, that puts it somewhere between two and three.… (plus d'informations)

I decided to push aside my other reading and buy this book and read it. While this book is very good, it is VERY hard to read. Jaycee Dugard is VERY graphic in describing the abuse she suffered at the hands of Garrido. I had to stop reading and just take a break from it. If not for that, this book can easily be read in one sitting. This is a quick read, but she really gets the point across how miserable her life was with the Garridos, how sick her kidnapper was and how badly she wanted to go home. She also gets across just how strong her spirit is. She truly is a remarkable woman and it's nothing short of amazing that she survived this ordeal along with her daughters.… (plus d'informations)