A review by nohoperadio
Betty by Tiffany McDaniel

3.5

This book, whose significant plot points mostly consist of unspeakable pointless cruelties inflicted on vulnerable children, is very interested in fucking you up. The book is frighteningly intent on this goal and very good at it. There are several scenes in here where the horror was, for me, a full-body experience, and at least once I thought I was in danger of being physically sick. If you read this, there’s going to be  a few moments where you think you’re seeing the worst of what I’m talking about, and you’ll be wrong.

So it might sound a little disingenuous when I say that my main complaint about this book is that it’s not brutal enough. The problem is our narrator, Betty, who is nominally a small child for most of the events of the book, but whose understanding of the traumatic situations she and her family are facing is so free of childlike confusion and helplessness that the effect is to trivialize them. I’ll give one unextreme but unusually clear example, this comes shortly after a scene in which Betty is in a body-image-related depression after facing racist bullying based on her visibly Cherokee ancestry:

But as I stared longer at my reflection, I asked myself what was so terribly wrong with the way I looked. After all, my ancestors had bundled magic on a thousand walks through Christ and millennias, denying the faintest suggestion that they were not beautiful enough. The black of my hair had been part of ancient ceremonies. My eyes were steeped in tradition, buoyed by the divinity of nature. Dad always said we came from great warriors. Did I not have this greatness in me? The power of a woman so ancient, but still young in her time. I imagined her as she was then. Her spirit fierce. Her bravery undeniable. How could I not be as powerful? Why could I not consider myself beautiful when I thought of her as the most beautiful one of all?

We all wish we lived in a world where nine-year-olds could therapy-talk themselves this effectively, but we all know we don’t. A big part of why we think of child abuse specifically as being so uniquely horrible is that we know children cannot do this, this wise philosophical distance that most of us struggle to achieve even as adults. However much pain she goes through, and there’s a lot, she’s never convincingly confused. This is not true of her mother and two sisters, who display all the moral and psychological disorientation you’d expect from the brutalities they suffer and feel like real people as a result. The story as narrated from their perspective would have been (both emotionally and technically) more difficult, but that’s the story this story made me want.