Lucky

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Daniel lives in the college town of Athens, Georgia. One of my dear friends is from Athens, attended UGA, and was married there, and if you are like her and have a love for that special place, this author clearly shares your same love in this book! It was a great setting to share Daniel’s story. Broadwater was tried and convicted in 1982 based largely on two pieces of evidence. 1. Sebold identified him as her rapist on the witness stand, and 2. microscopic hair analysis, which has since been deemed junk science.

It's hard to know how someone who has not been through the R-word would take a book like this, thinking it is too exhibitionistic or histrionic, perhaps a cry for attention or a way to say "This is why I'm worthy of a memoir and your personal tragedies are not." I'm not sure how well this book would educate non-victims either since it is so personal, rather than a rape-crisis-center-type pamphlet ("what to say/not to say to a victim"). But Sebold does depict the range of reactions, and sometimes I find her responses to the "bad reactors" a little curt, like she was built more for emotional survival than I was -- or maybe it is the other way around?

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The comparison to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime was the hook that got me crying over my ARC denial for this one. Okay, that’s not accurate. The house on the cover was the hook (duh) and the comparison just helped seal the deal. The best thing about this story is there is NOT an unreliable narrator. You see, the main character Daniel isn’t trapped in his house due to some psychosis and he doesn’t think he sees something while in a drunken stupor. Nope. Daniel is just like you and me. He sees a missing poster and then thinks “hmmmmm, maybe I saw that girl” but also “or maybe the girl I saw just looked similar to that girl.” Also, while Daniel is housebound, it is due to a debilitating physical condition rather than agoraphobia or something else that could render him housebound. And although there were a couple of times where I was screaming at my Kindle . . . . Saw the cute little house cover with a blurb from Stephen King "A fantastic novel.....You are going to like this a lot." I'd say, "I liked it, and I was thinking about it for a few days after I finished it." The ‘Aftermath’ section was strong, except at that point I think her use of choppy, six word sentences seem out of place. This is the stuff that should flourish, the drug use, the denial, the recovery. Come dicevo, la storia è proprio quello che è successo ad Alice quando aveva diciotto anni: stupro. Rape.

Daniel has a nice home, decent job, and very loyal friends. He’s also unable to talk, care for himself, or move without his wheelchair. When a local college student goes missing, he may be the only witness. Explaining what he saw and being taken seriously is the only problem. One of the many annoying things about being disabled is the obligation I always feel to make you feel better about your reactions to me.” It was enjoyable in the sense that I honestly had no idea where the story was going the entire time, so I was looking forward to the ending. There are so many lines and quotes embedded in this novel that I wanted to capture and keep in my heart forever. I loved the organization of the chapters and how we bounced around from the present to the past. This made me rageful. I do not have SMA, nor do I know anyone with SMA. I do have a disability but nothing resembling SMA. My disability never magically disappeared during crucial ‘plot points’ of my life. I don’t understand why this telepathy was even needed, couldn’t Leitch just replace “said” with “typed”? Was it that Daniel typed so slowly that he couldn’t effectively communicate what was needed in the allotted time for the story? As if he had… a disability? You’ll have to suspend your disbelief around some of the plot points, but it’s easy to do because Daniel’s voice and point of view are so compelling. He’s full of up-to-date cultural references, progressive social commentary, insight into Americans with disabilities (at least from one perspective), and a ton of humor.

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So, there was a peak and then a valley and then a peak and then a valley and so on.. I would find myself not being able to put the book down during the time between the rape and the trial, watching Alice justify her actions and her drinking and not even commenting on the fact that it was an escape mechanism. But, following the trial, I was in that sort of valley stage, which, I suppose, is how life goes and it took me a bit longer to get through that.

This is petty compared to everything else I wrote but I’m gonna add it in here anyway because it took me out of the book constantly- the old pop culture references. Daniel is 26 years old in 2019; the pop culture references he uses make him sound like he’s a grandpa. If Daniel was a movie buff or 1980’s pop culture aficionado, the references would make sense, but he’s not. I have never heard a young millennial/ old gen z person talk like this. I didn’t understand a single reference. I looked up half of them and figured the other half would just be an inside joke I would never understand… and the football references, omg, like water torture. Adult rape is a hard crime to classify. It's easy to get tangled up in legal arguments about consent, or to reduce its seriousness by hinting that the victim somehow had it coming. Even with DNA, it's a crime that is often impossible to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt. Yet in a very real way, rape is as serious as murder. It spares the finite of a person's body, while destroying the infinite of the soul. Cringey and uncomfortable. This book is trying to pander to progressive ideologies, but it comes off as disingenuous, preachy, and offensive. I wouldn’t recommend it. Second up date as of 12/2/2021 - Sebold has issued an apology. here. Memoir pulled for redrafting to include the exoneration. a b Patterson, Christina (November 25, 2021). "The real villain in Alice Sebold's tragic tale has yet to be caught". The Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235 . Retrieved November 29, 2021.

Marissa Stapley

If you were to look at Daniel, you’d assume he was miserable. Since childhood he’s lived with a degenerative disease that has confined him to a wheelchair, mostly unable to speak, and he knows ultimately that this will be his death sentence.