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14 reviews for:
On South Mountain: The Dark Secrets Of The Goler Clan
David Cruise, Alison Griffiths
3.58 AVERAGE
14 reviews for:
On South Mountain: The Dark Secrets Of The Goler Clan
David Cruise, Alison Griffiths
3.58 AVERAGE
This book was so so so so so boring for the first 200 pages and then overly graphic for the rest. The more I read the worse I felt about reading the book in the first place. Overall this book is voyeuristic and unkind to its subjects.
Yikes. A horrifying book, because it describes brutal sexual crimes against children. I picked it up because I have family now living on South Mountain in Nova Scotia, and this case from the 1980s brought notoriety to the area. The book gives an interesting history of the place and of the dissident Puritan families who settled there in the hills in the 18th century, remained insular, and, for generations, poor and poorly educated. The Goler clan was one of these. Many members of the family suffered physical and mental disabilities apparently as the result of inbreeding. The book makes clear that the system--doctors, police, schools, social workers--failed the Goler children for years--really, for generations. In 1983, one of the Goler children was finally listened to when she told a teacher she had been sexually abused by her father and other adults, and a knowledgable social worker and humane police officers actually followed up. Fifteen adults were eventually tried and found guilty of horrific assaults and rape, though their sentences seemed light to me. As a reader, I had to gloss over long sections of graphic testimony by the children--it made me feel sick to read. The authors did thorough research and an incredible number of very difficult interviews. Though the beginning history and the conclusion--in which one of the abused children, now grown up and moved away, returns to the old neighborhood--were fascinating, the book was overwritten and sometimes hard to follow; a good edit would have helped.
A sound, if disturbing, look at local history.
"The social workers, health professionals, educators, were like everyone else in the Valley ... They might know something but were content not to really know—at least to the point of doing anything ..."
I'm not sure at what point I became aware of the Golers and what they did. I remember being in junior high about five years after this book was released. It was not uncommon to hear people joke that certain students lived on "Goler mountain", and understanding what was meant by it. I didn't know which of the mountains was "Goler" mountain (having grown up in town), but at thirteen, that's irrelevant information.
As such, I write this review from the perspective of someone who grew up in the Annapolis Valley and who, on at least some level, has been "aware" of the nightmare surrounding the Goler family for as long as I can remember.
The story itself is an interesting one—I can't say I really enjoyed the book, given the subject matter, but it certainly both sated and inspired further morbid curiosity. Eventually.
The first several chapters were...unnecessary, to say the least. The valuable content they contained (the lack of agricultural promise on the mountain, and the societal rift between mountain and valley) could have been summed up in a quarter of the pages without the authors waxing poetic about Pangaea and plate tectonics. While the section on the Acadians and their subsequent expulsion was more interesting, it still struck me as wholly unnecessary to a book subtitled The Dark Secrets of the Goler Glan.
Once we're finally introduced to the family itself, the book picks up steam and becomes vastly more engaging, though not perfect. The inclusion of court transcripts in some points helps to underpin the horrors these children endured, but in others, because of the English used, make it more difficult to follow.
The last segment of the book shows Donna as an adult and her efforts to regain custody of her own trial. Frustratingly, rather than discuss the outcome of these efforts, the epilogue instead lists new charges for Cranswick and William.
"The social workers, health professionals, educators, were like everyone else in the Valley ... They might know something but were content not to really know—at least to the point of doing anything ..."
I'm not sure at what point I became aware of the Golers and what they did. I remember being in junior high about five years after this book was released. It was not uncommon to hear people joke that certain students lived on "Goler mountain", and understanding what was meant by it. I didn't know which of the mountains was "Goler" mountain (having grown up in town), but at thirteen, that's irrelevant information.
As such, I write this review from the perspective of someone who grew up in the Annapolis Valley and who, on at least some level, has been "aware" of the nightmare surrounding the Goler family for as long as I can remember.
The story itself is an interesting one—I can't say I really enjoyed the book, given the subject matter, but it certainly both sated and inspired further morbid curiosity. Eventually.
The first several chapters were...unnecessary, to say the least. The valuable content they contained (the lack of agricultural promise on the mountain, and the societal rift between mountain and valley) could have been summed up in a quarter of the pages without the authors waxing poetic about Pangaea and plate tectonics. While the section on the Acadians and their subsequent expulsion was more interesting, it still struck me as wholly unnecessary to a book subtitled The Dark Secrets of the Goler Glan.
Once we're finally introduced to the family itself, the book picks up steam and becomes vastly more engaging, though not perfect. The inclusion of court transcripts in some points helps to underpin the horrors these children endured, but in others, because of the English used, make it more difficult to follow.
The last segment of the book shows Donna as an adult and her efforts to regain custody of her own trial. Frustratingly, rather than discuss the outcome of these efforts, the epilogue instead lists new charges for Cranswick and William.
