Review: Strong At The Heart by Carolyn Lehman
Caroline Lehman’s book Strong At The Heart from 2005 features interviews with 11 survivors, 4 male and the rest female. She very wisely sets the tape recorder going, lets the interviewees tell their stories and takes their pictures, otherwise her intro at the beginning is her only other contribution aside from a few listings for further information at the end.
That’s the book in a nutshell, since it’s aimed at teenagers it’s shorter than implied by the advertising blurb and a flick-read to anyone used to reading longer individual survival memoirs. The book’s packaged nicely and with clear readable type. You could sit in the library and read it in one sitting. It’s useful for emerging victims so non-survivors could buy it as a starter gift for a newly disclosed teen victim on the way to reading something heavier like Beginning/Courage To Heal and/or Victims No Longer.
Just when I thought there was nothing useful in some of the stories when drilling through the book at breakneck speed, a single line or quotation can pop out of the text when re-reading. That’s how minor details can become significant to your own healing process, so the book is well worth a look, even if only as a launchpad for the author’s high quality blog on the same subject, which you can find here.
– CBG
