Day: February 21, 2018

Book Reviews: Daddy’s Curse by Luke G. Dahl

Trigger Warning: The subject of today’s review, Daddy’s Curse by Luke G. Dahl, depicts human trafficking, drug use, and rape. If you are under 18 years of age, are triggered by such depictions, and/or otherwise wish to avoid these topics, proceed with caution.

Happy Humpday, readers and writers! I’m not going to lie, I really feel under-the-weather today, but still want to bring you a new—and emotional—book for your consideration. In this post, I’m going to be reviewing Daddy’s Review: A Harrowing True Story of an Eight Year Old Girl Human Trafficking and Organized Crime Survivor by Luke G. Dahl.

Yuna was an ordinary eight-year-old girl living with her parents and younger sister in a small country home on the steppes of Mongolia. Then one day her world is shattered as a group of men kidnap her just outside her family’s house. The years which follow bring poor Yuna torture, rape, drugs, and abuse, with only one true friend to speak of and no light visible at the end of the tunnel. How will she survive these bleak events? Will she ever be free again? Or is this all that her life will ever be? And what really happened the day she was kidnapped all those years ago?


Image retrieved from Amazon

I have to warn that this book is not for the faint-of-heart. It is not overly-descriptive but it is descriptive enough that readers get a clear image of what these poor girls suffered through. Admittedly, I had a hard time reading the entire book; it’s only 76 pages—short enough to finish in a day—but I frequently had to take breaks in order to recover emotionally before I could continue.

This does not mean the book is bad. In fact, I argue the opposite. After all, in order for me to be so deeply affected by these terrors, I have to be able to connect with the people who suffer from them. I believe that Dahl does well on this front. I felt horrible for Yuna and the other girls, furious that no one would help them, and distraught that they very probably would never live normal lives again.

Honestly, given the emotionally hard time I had with some of the book, I’m glad that Dahl does not go into more detail on some of the horrors. For the most part, he chooses the right events to emphasize and lets the ones that are either too terrible for readers to stomach or which readers can understand without much description—or both—remain vague. Dahl also, for most of the book, maintains a brisk and engaging pace through this process of picking-and-choosing.

However, I wish that he had drawn out the last third of the book a little more. On the one hand, I’m a bit relieved that he didn’t because I’m not sure how much more of those scenes I could have taken. On the other hand, the pace was even quicker than earlier in the story, and that through me off some. It also would have helped if the “big reveal” had not been so abrupt, but I suppose that there’s not much to be done about that when it’s a true story. (I won’t discuss any more about that to avoid spoilers.)

Any pacing issues aside, this story is raw and honest, perhaps painfully so. Nothing—no one—is as it seems, and even through the eyes of the initially-naïve Yuna, readers know that almost immediately. Dahl’s ability to foreshadow while never stepping beyond the boundaries of first-person narration make this book even more tense and exciting than Yuna’s story already is. It made me want to keep reading despite knowing that relief was far, far off.

The praise for Dahl’s storytelling aside, I noticed multiple proofreading errors that sometimes interrupted my reading. Some of the errors I could brush aside as style choice in order to convey the voice of a young Mongolia girl, one whom I assume mostly spoke English as a second language. Still, not all of the errors could be attributed to stylistic choice. The overall quality of the story and the writing typically overpowered these mistakes, but I think that Dahl could have proofread better before publishing.

All in all, I think this book is great for those who can stomach the subject. The characters are real and have distinct personalities, well-rounded even without knowing much about their lives before being kidnapped, and Yuna’s narrative engages the reader with a candid, uncensored, ever-growing voice which makes them feel as though they’re listening to her tell the story in their own living room. Not everyone can handle the issues of human trafficking and rape, but I think it’s important to get these girls’ stories out and let people know that this does, indeed, still happen. If you want to understand this problem more, discover the human side of it, I highly recommend this short book.

You can obtain an eBook or paperback copy of Daddy’s Curse by Luke G. Dahl on Amazon.

Do you know of any books I should read? Want your work reviewed on this blog? E-mail me at thewritersscrapbin@gmail.com or message me on Fiverr and we can arrange something.

 


Designed by Stephanie Hoogstad circa 2011

Writers on Writing: Neil Gaiman

For today’s “Writers on Writing”, I’m turning to another contemporary genre writer, Neil Gaiman. Gaiman is a popular English author, best known for his novels Stardust, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, and American Gods, as well as his comic book series The Sandman. He has won the Bram Stoker, Hugo, and Nebula awards and the Carnegie and Newbery medals. His novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, was even voted Best Book of the Year in the 2013 British National Book Awards. His book Stardust was adapted into a film in 2007, and American Gods has been adapted into a television series by Starz with Gaiman himself as an executive producer.

For more information on this well-received author, be sure to visit his Wikipedia page.


Image retrieved from Buzzfeed

Unfortunately, I haven’t read much of Gaiman’s works. In fact, I’ve only read Stardust. I haven’t even watched any of the movies based on his work or the American Gods TV series. Even so, I admire the man and I wouldn’t be doing the fantasy, science fiction, or horror genres justice if I didn’t talk about him.

Gaiman, like most writers, has commented on the art of writing. In this post, I want to focus on a remark he made about handling feedback/criticism.

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

–Neil Gaiman

I find this quote very interesting as I believe it can be interpreted in two slightly different ways:

  1. Writers should be open to criticism because they very likely see something that you don’t. However, if they try and direct how you fix the problem too forcefully, their interference won’t really help because it will get in the way of your creativity and art.
  2. When critics say something is wrong or doesn’t work for them, they’re right because it’s their own opinion. You have to choose whether to act on it or not. However, if they try and force their revisions onto you, they’ll be wrong because it’s not your vision if you just follow their suggestions blindly.

No matter which of these interpretations you agree with, the second half of the statement remains the same: do not take critics too seriously if they insist on pushing their specific revisions on you.

Writers can be horrible about receiving feedback. Even if we don’t show it, we take it all pretty personally. I know I do. Feedback, even that with the best intentions, can discourage writers from that work or the craft altogether. Or worse, we ignore good feedback because we’re too attached to what we wrote originally.

Still, we need to know how readers receive our writing. After all, once it’s written and published, it no longer matters what you meant to say; all that matters is what readers think you said. It’s better to know ahead of time and adjust accordingly if we don’t like how our beta readers interpret it. More importantly, they can let us know where we make mental leaps that do not seem like leaps to us. Often we just don’t know when something isn’t as obvious as we see it.

Unfortunately, following feedback too closely could lead to a big mess of writing that even we can’t stand to read anymore. In particular, if we blindly believe when someone says that this is wrong with the draft and that we should do exactly this in order to fix it, we could be making a huge mistake and not realize it. Specific advice for how to fix a specific problem is too rigid for writing. Your writing is a growing piece of art, almost alive, in a way. If you let someone else to tamper so closely without any boundaries, they might coerce you into snipping off a life-sustaining root that only you knew about.

Of course, I don’t think Gaiman means to ignore them entirely. After all, he said that they are almost always wrong when they tell you exactly what is wrong in your writing and how to fix it. You should always keep your mind open to feedback. Regardless, take the second kind of feedback with a grain of salt. The critics cannot know your whole vision for your work; only you do. You know what it should grow into, and so you should follow your instincts about the work and use feedback more as…guidelines.

What is your interpretation of Gaiman’s advice? How should we handle feedback that points out specific problems and gives specific solutions? And where exactly is the line between being open to feedback and being pliable? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

 


Designed by Stephanie Hoogstad circa 2011