'DEAR CHILD'....."ROOM" WITH 3 VIEWS.......

 Dear Child by Romy Hausmann (2020)     The 'Captive Love Slave' sub-genre of thrillers has become all the more prevalent in this ever unhinged day and age.......

              Back in 1963 when John Fowles published "The Collector", the whole idea of a an obsessed kidnapper imprisoning the object of his affection stood out as distinctly perverse and odd.....

               Nowadays, in these horrifying times the headlines come ablaze with the ghastly abductions of Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Dugard and the three women enslaved for years  by a Cleveland madman.

             So it's no wonder that mystery-thriller writers seized upon the nightmare-inducing idea of an innocent women not only trapped , tortured and raped, but forced to bear children to their abductors..........

              Many of these books deal seriously with the overwhelming PTSD suffered by the abductees after they've either escaped or been rescued........and the subsequent torment both they and their families suffer as they attempt to return to normal lives.

              "Dear Child" does all that, but in true pop-culture thriller style, it constructs a hall-of-mirrors full of twists, in which nothing and no one are they seem to be.......

               Starting off with a similarity to Emma Donoghue's "Room", a captive young woman who's been missing 13 years manages to kill her captor and escape with her two children........the children she gave birth to as the result of her abductor's multiple rapes.

               From there, the narrative divides between the the escaped woman, the woman's distraught father who has never stopped searching for her and the woman's autistic 13 year old daughter.........

                Now keep in mind......none of what we just described to you is necessarily true.......and none (or possibly all) of the three narrators are being entirely truthful with you either........

                The result of this perpetual unreliability will have you tearing through this book within a day or two until you're satisfied that all the twists are revealed and every truth becomes apparent. 

                And that, faithful visitors, makes for a top-notch read to keep you up late at night......and by far one of the most entertaining new books we've come across this Fall. 4 stars (****).