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A review by sneeps
A Child Called "It" by Dave Pelzer
1.0
I don't recall my feelings on this book when I read it in high school so I went for a reread when I saw it at the library.
Child abuse is serious and I'm not interested in debating the veracity of Pelzer's claims here. My gripe with this book is that it is just very poorly written. It's torture porn and nothing else. Especially off the heels of recently reading I'm Glad My Mom Died by Janette McCurdy, this book is glaringly bad. There's no sense of a life or people beyond the abuse, aside from a very fake sounding idyllic childhood section at the beginning. The dialogue is cheesy and cringy. The prose is stuffed with cliches. There's zero effort made to understand the mother's actions or motivations, supposedly because Pelzer is writing from a child's perspective. I think that was a poor choice narratively. It makes the story very one dimensional, and there's no substance beyond the abuse. The grim determination of a child to be a triumph of the human spirit is just so uninterestingly portrayed.
And okay in terms of whether the abuse was real, misremembered, or completely fabricated, at the very least it was exaggerated in the way a memory from childhood would be, and in editing I think that should have been corrected for acknowledged. Totally plausible that an abusive guardian could punish a child by having him sit in a cold bath. Very unlikely a malnourished child would survive being kept in cold water for multiple hours on multiple occasions. Grown adults get hypothermia much quicker than that. This should have been acknowledged "it felt like hours but I don't know how long it was" or the claim that he was left for hours should have been cut entirely. Many similar situations are described that sound just a little too intense to believe they happened in exactly that way and didn't kill him or leave permanent physical scars to adulthood. But whatever. Go read Janette McCurdy's memoir instead.
Child abuse is serious and I'm not interested in debating the veracity of Pelzer's claims here. My gripe with this book is that it is just very poorly written. It's torture porn and nothing else. Especially off the heels of recently reading I'm Glad My Mom Died by Janette McCurdy, this book is glaringly bad. There's no sense of a life or people beyond the abuse, aside from a very fake sounding idyllic childhood section at the beginning. The dialogue is cheesy and cringy. The prose is stuffed with cliches. There's zero effort made to understand the mother's actions or motivations, supposedly because Pelzer is writing from a child's perspective. I think that was a poor choice narratively. It makes the story very one dimensional, and there's no substance beyond the abuse. The grim determination of a child to be a triumph of the human spirit is just so uninterestingly portrayed.
And okay in terms of whether the abuse was real, misremembered, or completely fabricated, at the very least it was exaggerated in the way a memory from childhood would be, and in editing I think that should have been corrected for acknowledged. Totally plausible that an abusive guardian could punish a child by having him sit in a cold bath. Very unlikely a malnourished child would survive being kept in cold water for multiple hours on multiple occasions. Grown adults get hypothermia much quicker than that. This should have been acknowledged "it felt like hours but I don't know how long it was" or the claim that he was left for hours should have been cut entirely. Many similar situations are described that sound just a little too intense to believe they happened in exactly that way and didn't kill him or leave permanent physical scars to adulthood. But whatever. Go read Janette McCurdy's memoir instead.