Lucky by Alice Sebold

I read Sebold's book The Lovely Bones a few years ago, and really connected with her genuine writing style. Once I finished Lucky, I realized why she writes the way she does. Lucky is the true story of Alice Sebold.

Lucky starts out with the very detailed, very gruesome description of Sebold's rape when she was a freshman in college in the early 1980s. The reader is then taken on Sebold's journey through the healing, the trial, and the depiction of rape victims. This story is a very heavy story, it not light-hearted at all, yet it is very captivating. When I finished reading, I put the book down and contemplated on the way I handle things in life. Sebold's message is a message of inspiring strength. I highly recommend this book.

"When Sebold was a college freshman at Syracuse University, she was attacked and raped on the last night of school, forced onto the ground in a tunnel 'among the dead leaves and broken beer bottles.' In a ham-handed attempt to mollify her, a policeman later told her that a young woman had been murdered there and, by comparison, Sebold should consider herself lucky. That dubious 'luck' is the focus of this fiercely observed memoir about how an incident of such profound violence can change the course of one's life. Sebold launches her memoir headlong into the rape itself, laying out its visceral physical as well as mental violence, and from there spins a narrative of her life before and after the incident, weaving memories of parental alcoholism together with her post-rape addiction to heroin. In the midst of each wrenching episode, from the initial attack to the ensuing courtroom drama, Sebold's wit is as powerful as her searing candor, as she describes her emotional denial, her addiction and even the rape (her first 'real' sexual experience). She skillfully captures evocative moments, such as, during her girlhood, luring one of her family's basset hounds onto a blue silk sofa (strictly off-limits to both kids and pets) to nettle her father. Addressing rape as a larger social issue, Sebold's account reveals that there are clear emotional boundaries between those who have been victims of violence and those who have not, though the author attempts to blur these lines as much as possible to show that violence touches many more lives than solely the victim's." Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Read a few pages: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316096199/ref=pd_bxgy_img_a/104-5804579-5127935?%5Fencoding=UTF8