Daddy's Girl

Rating:
Summary: 5 Stars for a ground-breaking work!
Review: Although this book was written two decades ago, it is still a ground-breaking memoir. In fact, it was the first book on sexual abuse I had ever read. As a victim myself, Vale Allen's voice helped me realize my feelings were normal, I wasn't to blame and that I could make something of myself.
Vale Allen uses her skills as a novelist to reveal her life-altering experience in surprisingly entertaining way.
Unfortunately all these years later, there are too many new victims. I hope Daddy's Girl will help them as it helped me.

Rating:
Summary: Knew better!!
Review: I found it hard to believe that Charlotte Vale Allen let this sexual abuse by her father continue until she was 18 years old. By that time, she certainly knew it was wrong. For that reason, I did not like this book.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding!
Review: Of all the books written on the subject of child abuse, this book (one of the very first published) stands alone as a singular accomplishment. It is honest and insightful, yet never overly graphic. The author brings her considerable writing talent to bear on her reflection of how years of abuse shaped her as an adult and a parent. Never bitter, never placing blame, Charlotte Vale Allen offers a potent look at the insidious permanent effects of her childhood experience. It is a gracious, heartfelt autobiography in which the author not only never names her parents but, in many ways, offers an understanding of the family dynamics at play that is nothing less than remarkable. To read her fiction and then to read this book is to see a very full portrait of a woman with the heart of a lion and a powerful gift of insight into the behavior, not only of others but also of her own self--past and present. It is the definitive book to read in order to comprehend how an extraordinary child coped with an ongoing horror and yet emerged to take what she'd learned and turn it to the good by writing books that always offer viable explanations for what is, so often, inaccessible to most of us. In its own right, Daddy's Girl is a quiet masterpiece.