Review: A Stolen Life by Jaycee Dugard

[shivi1321]

A stolen life is the true story of an 11 year old girl named Jaycee Dugard, who was stolen and kept from her family for 18 years in the backyard of a man named Phillip Garrido. A man who sexually and mentally abused her with the help of his wife and his own mental issues.

The book's language starts at a very basic vocabulary, as if it was really written by Jaycee at the time of her kidnapping. Further on in the novel it gets a bit better, even though she didn't continue her education while in captivity. Her story is absolutely heart wrenching to read and is a horrendous thing for an 11 year old to have to deal with for 18 years. I think to myself about how I wouldn't be able to deal with the situations the way she did, or if I would have survived the experience at all.

I admire that the author chose to acknowledge that she is writing the novel "in my own words, in my own way, exactly as I remember it" (this blurb is shown on the back preview on the book as well as in the introduction). So while we as the reader get to decide how truthful we perceive our author to be, she acknowledges that what she remembers might not be 100% true.

i personally didn't like the formatting of the book. After every chapter there was a reflections chapter talking about how she feels about what happened then, now. I thought it was a bit distracting to the story, not that people wouldn't want to read it, but it distracted me from the bonding of her as a character. In the middle of one of the reflections chapters she added 30 pages of a journal that she wrote in captivity, while I can see how this could benefit the story and how she was feeling at the time,it didn't really add anything but talking about her cats that were with her and what her dreams were.

While the story was a great learning experience, there were too many thoughts and distractions from the author in current time that I felt should have been saved for the end. So I give it 2.5/4 stars.