Genre: Memoir
Description:
“Born into a military family bound by loyalty and silence, Adriene
grows up beneath the shadow of her mother's untreated schizophrenia and violent
instability. Her early years in Houston are marked by physical, emotional, and
sexual abuse, as well as deep poverty and neglect. Through a child's eyes, the
world becomes a labyrinth of danger and yearning - a place where love and
terror are indistinguishable and where survival depends on invisibility.
As her mother's delusions intensify, Adriene and her younger brother
are swept into a cycle of instability: temporary relatives' homes, decrepit
apartments, shelters, and the bureaucratic indifference of Child Protective
Services. Her life becomes a study in adaptation. Teachers, social workers, and
therapists appear as both saviors and spectators, their well-meaning
interventions undercut by a system that cannot see the full truth.
Amid this chaos, Adriene discovers a sanctuary in learning. Books
become her escape and her mirror, a means of constructing identity from
fragments. Her intelligence and resilience earn her entry into gifted programs
and, later, a transformative scholarship through the Duke University Talent
Identification Program's ADVANCE Camp - a rare space of belonging and
recognition. Yet even moments of promise are shadowed by trauma's lingering
grasp; her mind remains both brilliant and haunted.
Foster care, meant to save her, instead subjects Adriene to new forms
of cruelty. The ‘Bitch from Hell,’ her abusive foster mother, wields authority
with sadism cloaked in righteousness. Still, Adriene's intellect and
adaptability allow her to navigate this world - and, in small acts of defiance,
reclaim pieces of her agency.
College becomes both a milestone and a reckoning. Having survived the
unimaginable, Adriene graduates with honors in International Business, only to
find herself unprepared for the invisible toll of trauma in adulthood.
Depression, self-sabotage, and a string of hollow relationships bring her to
the brink of despair once more. The memoir crescendos with a raw confrontation
of suicidality - and the awakening that follows.
In one of the book's most powerful sections, Adriene revisits her own
CPS case files, psychiatric evaluations, and therapy notes. Reading herself
through the cold lens of institutional language, she confronts the staggering
disconnect between documented ‘stability’ and lived abuse. This duality - the
official record versus the inner truth - forms the heart of Unbroken.
The narrative closes with a reclamation: survival not as triumph over pain, but
as the deliberate act of continuing to live and love despite it.”
Author:
“While her childhood and early adult life might have been tumultuous,
Adriene is now happily married to a wonderful man and living a life she could
only dream of when she was young. Adriene’s daughter, currently at university,
was, is, and will always be a handful and Adriene wouldn’t have it any other
way. She is blessed to now live a rather bland life filled with family and
friends and is a firm believer in the idea that ‘boring is underrated.’”
Appraisal:
My normal take on memoirs is that they can work two ways. Some
probably have aspects of both. One is to recognize aspects of myself or my own
life experience in the story. Comparing, contrasting, and sometimes seeing your
comparable experiences in a different light are some of the appeal of those
that fall in this category. The other way it can go is for the life being
chronicled to be nothing like yours. Sometimes that is too bad (like that
person becoming a millionaire which you’re still shy of making) and sometimes
you’re incredibly grateful that you haven’t gone through anything close to what
this person has. For me this book is solidly in that last category and
hopefully that’s the case for most of you.
I think understanding the kind of situations that some kids find
themselves in, the difficulty they have and the ways government entities that
are supposed to help when the issue is discovered can sometimes fall short are
all things that are valuable for all of us to understand.
Buy now
from: Amazon US Amazon UK
FYI:
Quoting from the book:
“Trigger Warnings: Emotional and physical
abuse, the sexual assault of a child, the drowning death of a child, extreme
poverty, mental illness, homelessness, abusive foster care, pedophilia, graphic
sexual descriptions, violence, bulimia, incest, death, and suicide.
Please proceed with caution.”
Format/Typo
Issues:
The review is based on an ARC version (advance reviewer copy) and I
can’t gauge the final product in this area.
Rating: ****
Four Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate word count: 50-55,000 words
No comments:
Post a Comment