A Stolen Life was such a hard book for me to not only to read because of the subject matter, but to rate. I really wanted to give her 5 stars - for a victim to be able to come forward and tell her story is so courageous, but I just couldn’t get past the writing. Her voice in the story was so childish and I don’t know if this was done on purpose to project how innocent she was, or because of the fact that she only had a grade 5 education, but it was very distracting for the reader. There were narratives that contained vocabulary well above what the average reader would encounter and I felt like her editor actually did the book a disservice by introducing these words that clearly are not the authors. There were also many inconsistencies with tense and timelines that were confusing when going from past to present so frequently in such a short book. This book is an astonishing account of a shocking act of cruelty and violence to a child/young woman. The fact that she remained and continues to remain so positive after everything that happened to her is a testament to the human spirit and is incredibly moving.
