review: The House of my Mother

 A Daughter's Quest for Freedom

by Shari Franke 

We all need a little reminder that if a sane person tries to live with insane people, they’ll eventually go insane themselves. Luckily, this young person gets away…but not before suffering nearly irreparable harm to her psyche.

Funny thing is, a lot of the incidents of her childhood seem perfectly normal—taken individually, who hasn’t suffered an occasional humiliation when a parent laughs at the wrong time? Or forces them to smile when they want to cry, or takes them out of the school they love, or punishes them for wrongdoings?  But when you start to take them all together, they get scary. 

I only wish she’d been a little less in her own head during the narrative and a little more omniscient. When something humiliating happens, I understand exactly how she feels, but I often didn’t have a clue exactly what was happening and how it would appear to an outsider.

Also beware that the times when she quotes the exact words used by her mother or the evil conneXions woman, Jody’s, or even Derek, the man who takes advantage of her pain, you’ll be so angry you want to scream. These people were psychological warfare experts. Evil.