2 stars

I received a copy of this book through Goodreads in exchange for an honest review.

This book just wasn’t for me. There is no doubt that EsthersChild (Patricia Struntz) had a very hard life and overcame so much. She is a very strong person and I am glad that her faith in God was able to help her in her battle with abuse and other struggles.

However, I do not particularly like her writing. It was very simplistic with not that much insight. The story was interesting enough, but the writing just did not do it justice. I did like some of the metaphors she used such as the pottery example, but the rest of the writing was sub par.

I also found the name changes annoying. It is common in memoirs to change people’s names, however instead of using actual names, Struntz chose to use weird nicknames such as GirlChild, BoySon, and Youngest for her own children. I personally think that one’s own children deserve better, more creative names in one’s own book. But that’s just my preference. And some of the other nicknames seem to write off the character completely such as Crony and Heavy.

The writing is also a bit ignorant. It is homophobic without even addressing the homophobia. There is no discussion about it or learning about actual gay people.

This was disappointing to me. I was also disappointed by how Struntz addressed autism spectrum disorders. In the book, there is a character with autism (I think, she’s kind of unclear about it and doesn’t really go into many details). Instead of trying to understand autism and the person involved, Struntz just writes him off as “simple” and is done with it.

I actually think that my favorite part of the book was the epilogue, which was written 19 years after Struntz originally wrote the book. This section seemed predictably more mature, but I related to it much more than the rest of the book.

The actual book comes off as ignorant, immature, and doesn’t really look at other’s perspectives in the story, which did not pull me in.