Dancing with the octopus A memoir of a crime

Harding's compelling memoir introduces readers to her emotionally fragile family and shares how being kidnapped and brutally raped at age 14 affected her life. Harding's mother was emotionally and physically abusive, and her gentle, loving father had a job that kept him on the road. Even when he was home, everyone tiptoed around, not wanting to set Mom off. This tense combination of fear and denial continued unabated when Harding was kidnapped by a neighborhood boy only three years her senior. Harding tells her story through chapters that skip around chronologically, from her early childhood to marriage and motherhood to events in her attacker's life, her efforts as an adult to gain emotional and mental stability, and the assault itself. Harding is completely honest, whether describing her wariness, defiance, bewilderment, self-doubt, or the truths she eventually discovered about herself and her parents. The title comes from a childhood game that aptly describes Harding's delicate dance with her family. Her unsparing and candid observations allow readers to really get to know this strong, determined survivor.

A powerful account of sexual assault and decades of lingering trauma. The opening of Harding's memoir, told in brief episodes, finds her confronting Charles, who, when she was a young teenager, kidnapped and raped her--and, we learn, surely would have killed her had she not escaped. There he sat, imprisoned, nonchalantly, "as if he were waiting there just for me in the same way he'd been that afternoon, twenty-five years ago, when our paths happened to cross." The author reconstructs the terrible events of the assault, unpremeditated only to the extent that she just happened to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time as Charles, recently released from juvenile detention, acted out his pent-up rage. Complicating the tale is a home life that might have seemed normal to a casual observer but that was not: Her unhinged, raging mother "beat my legs with a belt so bad I had to cover them up at school the next day" while her father did little to protect her from that constant wrath. Still, in the aftermath of that night in 1978, Harding forged a deep connection with him: "The crime had been important to my relationship with my father, forged an inseparable bond, and now it explained my unshakable loyalty to him," she writes. All of these threads have unhappy resolutions even as Harding tries to get at the root of the debilitating anxiety that ensued years later. She decides that one key to restoring her health was to follow the tenets of "restorative justice," one aspect of which is to face one's attacker and hold a dialogue--in this case one that took place just before his release from prison, testing whether the transformation from violent youth to spiritual adult he said he underwent was genuine at all. A thoughtfully told story that may inspire others to find healing in the wake of savage crime. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.