Madwoman

I read this from cover to cover without any breaks and as fast as I was devouring this harrowing violent and terrifying life that Cala Lily and her mother Alma had endured. They’d been imprisoned and abused in a vicious and brutal domestically abusive environment at the hands of her father. The escalation was terrorizing and the attempted escapes thwarted by his stalking, obsessive rage and had diminished his wife and Cala Lily’s mother so badly that it was impossible for her to form a coherent and effective plan to save herself and her daughter. It was always Cala Lily getting between her father’s physical beatings and demanding he get her to the hospital. The years and years of medical records and th obvious abuse she was subjected to wasn’t unknown by the medical community. A nurse had told them when she was 16 after one of the worst beatings she’d been through that what was happening with her mother wouldn’t last forever. Her mother through her deluded and Stockholm like syndrome had believed it meant that her father would be better and the beatings would stop not comprehending that what the nurse was telling them was her body was so broken with bones that had been broken numerous times in nearly every part of her and the literal hole he’d kicked into her back that she was already at deaths door. The internal bleeding and damage that was continuous for decades had left so much scar tissue and untreated injuries had healed incorrectly in areas that were precariously close to permanently taking her mothers life such as the torn artery in her heart or the bone fragments in the spine not to mention the multiple fractures in her skull and the broken jars repeatedly left untreated and the teeth that had been knocked out of her mouth the front ones had been smashed up into her jaw/face and the blooming bruises of deep purple to light yellow from new and old beatings were everywhere there was skin. The fracture he’d left last time had dented in her head just above her eye and just under the eye socket. Her lips had become twice as large as they were originally and eventually her jaw was pushed over to one side with the top lip area sinking into her face from the teeth being up inside her mouth. Each time the police were called the father would say her mother was an alcoholic madwoman that he was trying to get help for and just protect his daughter, even though there was blood everywhere all over the walls and rugs and his hands the police would believe him because he was sober the alcohol reeked out of her mother and she wouldn’t ever say he did anything and when Cala lily would be yelling in the corner it was her dads fault they ignored her and would tell her mother to quiet down and stop disturbing the peace and leave then all there. Years of these police officers accounts were in the records about her mother. Hospital records weren’t accessible only if her mother had them released and she hadn’t the will or desire to lose her husband still wanting to believe he’d stop that she’d been the one to set him off that he did love them she blamed his fathers own abuse of his wife and on her dad and then his enlistment into the Vietnam war. Her mother would romanticize her father but as they moved and met a neighbor whose daughter was terminally ill and Calas age she began to call Alma out on how bad it was and that she was destroying her daughters life and would be the reason she would go on to marry the man who’d beat her just as her husband was and her mothers husband had. She was continuing a traumatic family cycle that was not fair to her daughter she will be the one who over the years had helped Cala see that she needed to get herself and her mother out of that situation and far gone or she would bury her mother or die with both of her parents as her dad had recently begun talking about how they had all needed to die because he had tainted and poisoned them by his “dark traveler” is what he called his abusive explosive and violent behavior and tendencies separating his accountability for the first 13 yrs of her life to finally saying they were the same thing he and the dark traveler and that he had seeped into the two of them and they all had to die for the violent rage to stop. One night becomes the night he is going through with his decision. It doesn’t end as he planned: he ends up 33 floors down having gone over the edge of their lanai and Cala Lily had watched as her mother ran out of the house and she ran to the neighbor to tell her what happened and the very last time she would see her mother was on the pavement outside the apartment howling over her father as a large group began to form and she never saw her or heard from her again. Everyone believed her to be dead: until a letter from her mother arrived from the prison. And her entire world she has built on the lie of her dead parents in an accident normal childhood is ready to implode her vigilantly and hyper controlled life of safety, obsessive organic eating vitamins etc and doing absolutely opposite of her own childhood and parents addictions and abuses/neglect. She sets forth to stop her putting a plan into motion oblivious that she isn’t the only person who will come back from the dead with an agenda of their own who’s already far ahead of her. Wild twist at the end will take your breath away and applaud such a clever climatic ending

I am an avid reader, but I read suspense novels. And this book was listed as suspense. I didn’t understand it. In fact, I nearly gave up on the book, put it to the side and let it sit, unfinished. But I kept at it. After the book was over 90% complete, it did get suspenseful for maybe one chapter.
But overall, it is a good book and told a good story. An important story to someone.
But the person who listed it as a suspense has no freakin idea. They would likely lose their mind if ever reading something I like to read.

Pretty predictable but a decent read