3 out of 4 stars
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A Mother’s Courage by Suzy Milhoan is a self-help book filled with detailed accounts of physical and mental abuse by her father. She interviews her four siblings and her mother to get their point of view on how the decades of abuse has affected them. She hopes that by writing about the turmoil that they grew up in, others will have the courage and knowledge to escape an abusive relationship before it traumatizes their children and negatively impacts the rest of their lives.
There are four sections in this book, each focusing on different topics of domestic violence. The chapters in each section are organized by incidence of abuse in chronological order. The first section is about how children feel when they are witnessing physical and verbal abuse between their parents. Milhoan writes about her most traumatizing experiences that triggered each emotion. She includes family photographs and the different point of views from her siblings in each story. This section is important because often times the abused parent does not realize that their children are being effected even if they are not directly being physically abused. These stories can encourage a family to leave the abuser before too much emotional damage is done to the children. The other sections of the book cover mental health issues, important reasons to get children out of an abusive environment, and concludes with many resources on how get help.
Some of the stories are painful to read because of the details of physical abuse. There is a warning in the introduction that states “this book includes graphic details of domestic abuse not appropriate for those under the age of eighteen.” I would use personal discretion for teens under the age of 18 to read this book because some of the stories and resources can help them avoid or get out of an abusive relationship. This family’s story started with a teen marriage, and also shares the negative effects of domestic violence when the children get into relationships as teens.
Milhoan explains that this book was “written in layman’s terms” which sets it apart from other self-help books on abuse. It is not a clinical guide, or filled with research findings. It is similar to reading unedited journal entries, with random thoughts added in between her story-telling. When she interviews her siblings, it is an account of raw emotions and disorganized thoughts. This writing style adds to the authenticity of the people involved, which I believe was important to her. She did a thorough job at conveying the reality of how bad physical and verbal abuse has affected her family into their adulthood.
I would have given this book a perfect score, but some parts of the book were repetitive and could have been left out. I give it a 3 out of 4 and would highly recommend it to anyone in an abusive relationship because there are resources in here to help them get out and seek help when there seems to be no way out of it. Some might read this book and realize that they are in an abusive relationship and can use the resources to help them take necessary steps to get out of it before it does too much damage. I would also recommend this to adults who witnessed abuse or were abused as children to help them with rehabilitation. There’s so much that can be learned and used to improve your life from everyone’s perspective in this book. You learn from all of the individual perspectives in an abusive environment: the abused mother, the abusive father, and the children involved.
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A Mother's Courage
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