A Child Called "It": One Child's Courage to Survive

I found this book to be very disturbing in many ways.
First the shear horror of the acts inflicted on this child by a parent were too disturbing to complete.
Second, the detail that is included in the book from the time this man was 5 or 6 until he was 12 or 13 is just a little too over the top for me to believe it is actually the memory of a small child.

I am not denying that he was abused but I felt there was a little bit of embelishment from the adult writing.

I could not finish the book nor am I interested in ready the rest of his writtings. I find it amazing that he can over come the abuse and become a whole person but it was just a little much for me

It's hard to believe that anything like this can ever happen. I admire that Dave Pelzer came far enough to be able to write about this book and the horrors of child abuse. Violent, senseless, and powefully told.

The book was for my daughter. It arrived quickly and she didn't put it down until she was finished. Transaction went very smoothly.

This book was painful and disturbing to read. The author's point-of-view, which seems confusing at first, is absolutely the voice of an abused child. I am highly upset at those Amazon reviewers who questioned whether or not he was really an abused child. This is Dave Pelzer's view of his world as a child. The emotions are overdrawn and the situations outrageous and improbable because he is writing as an adult, trying to recreate the emotions he felt and what he lived through as a child.

I'm not a big book reader so of course I was the last person in my group of friends to read A Child Called It. Having heard so many good things about the book, I had really high hopes for it and fortunately I found it be so good that I read it straight through in a couple of hours.

So what's the book about? A Child Called it is an autobiographical account of a young boy named Dave and his horrible childhood. At first, Dave's family seemed perfect. His mother was doting and a perfect housewife. His dad was a firefighter. He had two brothers and the lot of them would go on wonderful family vacations. Then, almost overnight, Dave's mother becomes violent and seperates Dave from the rest of the family. She makes him starve, forces him to do chores (when his brothers don't have to do any), and even stabs him. A Child Called It describes the gruesome events that surrounded his childhood leading up to the day Dave is taken away from his mother.

Let's talk about the positives first. Although this book mainly describes the horrible things that Dave was forced to go through, I liked that it was still written as a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Dave goes into detail about certain events in which he was disgustingly mistreated. The most heartbreaking scenes deal with events in which Dave's mother appears to show some sympathy towards the boy, giving Dave hope, only to return back to her unloving state. I don't consider myself to be an emotional person but I actually shed a few tears during one point.

I think the biggest part of the book that I enjoyed was the overall feeling of Dave pushing himself to survive even through his grim circumstances. Dave had to deal with physical problems as well as emotional problems and he still pushed himself through it all. I think that's incredible.

And now for the negatives. I personally feel that the book is short. I understand that Dave Pelzer had plans to turn his story into a trilogy but as an individual book, I felt that there should've been more. Other reviewers have mentioned that certain parts of the book seem to be a bit overly dramatized. In a way I agree but there's no way of knowing if Mr. Pelzer stretched the truth a bit or things did indeed happen the way they were described in the book.

If you're like me and you haven't read this amazing book yet, I encourage you to read it whenever you can. It's truly inspiring and I can't wait to read the others.