With great courage and startling compassion, Silverman tells [her] story. . . . Harrowing in its depiction of savage violation and profoundly moving in its portrait of a child's fear, confusion, and desperate search for a safe place.

—Kirkus Reviews

This harrowing memoir gives voice to the inarticulate terror Silverman suffered as a child, when she could never find the right words to describe her situation. She has found them now.

—Booklist

Readers of Silverman's wrenching memoir . . . are in for a rough emotional ride, but it is well worth it.

—Ms. Magazine

Silverman's lyric style transforms a ravaged childhood into a work of art. The book reads like a poem.

—St. Petersburg Times

Living, empowering proof that an orchid can bloom right up through concrete. A remarkable achievement from a remarkable woman who forces us to look for a word beyond 'survivor.'

—Andrew Vachss, author of Haiku

Silverman has a brave, piercing intelligence which transcends psychological explanations and does not require symbolism to convey a sense of what she went through. . . . She has learned exquisitely how to look at what she could not face and how to speak through those silences.

—Fourth Genre

Searing, brave, powerfully-written . . . Sue Silverman's memoir is about more than incest; it is about evil, about denial, about the great chasm between the public facade of a prominent, successful family and its painful reality, and it is about how, as in a Greek tragedy, a curse has been passed down through several generations. This book is the cry that shatters the curse.

—Adam Hochschild, author of Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son

Nothing less than a bolt of electricity to the hopeful part of us that believes every portrait of a happy family that we see. . . . A terrifying and heartening book . . . I know it's going to be passed urgently from hand to hand.

—Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After