prettybooksprettyplants's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative reflective sad tense slow-paced

4.25

freddieblooms's review against another edition

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emotional informative inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

carmenfullarton's review

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challenging emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

itsprinprin's review against another edition

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5.0

Chanel takes you by the hand and walks you through her experience from the day of the sexual assault, through the court case and to the present day. She eloquently describes her state of mind and how the lives of her family and friends have been impacted. It was eye-opening to learn how arduous court trials can be and how much it can demand from victims and their families.

This book will make you feel a number of emotions but the most notable one will be anger for the injustice that victims experience when they summon their strength to fight the cruelty they have been subjected to. A jarring reminder that society has a long way to go when it comes to supporting victims and handling sexual assault cases.


All in all, a truly valiant and inspiring book that will beckon the attention of all those who pick it up.

adavis14's review against another edition

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5.0

This may be the most impactful book I have ever read. She walks through her experience in the most eloquent, insightful, and eye opening way. She verbalized things I didn’t know how to, she denormalized everyday aspects of womenhood. She truly captured the experience of victimhood and of being a woman in the United States. I think that everyone should have to read this book to understand how prevent any assault is and how the system works against victims.

monzillareads's review against another edition

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5.0

This will move you. Powerful writing, simultaneously informative of how broken the justice system is for victims of sexual assault and poignant in how Miller expresses her thoughts and feelings in the aftermath.

Miller illuminates faults and cracks in the legal system and the rabble of social media that bend towards privilege and misogyny. With unrelenting sharpness she shows us how we measure the worth of a victim by their past and the worth of the male perpetrator by their “potential”.

This memoir flipped everything I thought I knew about what people go through when their bodies and minds are violently violated. There is clearly an epidemic of college sexual assault, I’ll let the facts and figures speak for themselves, so I don’t think it unreasonable for this to be required reading for freshmen — to reiterate that under no circumstances is a human being worthy of disrespect and how it is possible to move forward, however broken, for the 1 in 5 women who will be sexually assaulted in college.

cassidy27's review against another edition

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5.0

5 stars ⭐️ There are no words. This was amazing and mind blowing and will stick with me for a long time

kirsten0929's review against another edition

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5.0

[2019] Started out mad and just got madder. Book 3/6 for the second round of the BookTubePrize. Star rating and more to come.

(June 3, 2020) Didn’t really know anything about her story, only vaguely recalled the case - swimmer, rape, Stanford - that was about it. But I knew just enough to start out mad. That anger simmered for the first half of the book, and then increased from there as she talked about what came after the guilty verdict. The injustice was excruciating and infuriating. This book was a full accounting of the time from the rape through to the time the verdict was upheld on appeal several years later. While sometimes it seemed like a lot of day to day, it was important to provide this fuller picture. Victims lives aren’t just highlight reel moments covered by the papers; they have to live every single day carrying with them what happened, and she is able to give us a sense of the relentlessness of living every day after something like this has happened. The writing is strong, rich and descriptive. She is able to express herself in such a way that we can feel the pain, anger, fear, the humiliation, all of it. She often uses short anecdotes and childhood memories to make points about her present which is an effective technique. So many insights and really thoughtful analysis but maybe this sums up the injustice: “The assault is never personal, the blaming is.”

reader_divya123's review against another edition

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Extremely hard read.

ellen_meyer's review against another edition

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5.0

A stunning memoir...a must-read for all women and men.