I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Although we, the readers, were able to see that the parents were actually abusing their children, we were also shown many instances that proved that they did, indeed, love the children, as well. So many times, authors who write this type of biographical book make the parents out to be absolute horrors , Although I certainly felt sympathy for the children, the author managed to show that the parents were also worthy of our sympathy. It it was interesting that all of the children seemed to turn into well adjusted adults with the exception of Maureen. This was odd to me because, of all the children, Maureen was the one who spent the least amount of time actually with the family, Since she spent so much time in 'normal' households, I thought it was interesting that she was the one who seemed to have the most problems as an adult.. Since most of these children did turn into well-adjusted adults, were the parents really so awful?

I was very excited to read this book as several of my friends had read and enjoyed it. From the beginning, I found it very tedious and uninteresting. I kept waiting for it to get better, but it never did! I thought the characters were very poorly developed, which made it impossible for me to empathize with any of them. The only character that had any real depth for me was Helen's mother, and her part in the story was minimal. I did not find the book to be suspensful or frightening, as many of my friends did. Again, I think this was due to the fact that I just could not connect with any of the characters. Most of the time I was reading this book, I was merely counting down how many pages I still had to read. I was in hopes that the ending would be good enough to somewhat make up for the poor story line, but the ending was as dissapointing as the rest of the book.