Lucky

Lucky
by Alice Sebold
Pages: 243
Published by Hachette Book Group
Publication Date September 16th 2002
Source: Free Little Library
Genres: Memoir
Goodreads

In a memoir hailed for its searing candor and wit, Alice Sebold reveals how her life was utterly transformed when, as an eighteen-year-old college freshman, she was brutally raped and beaten in a park near campus. What propels this chronicle of her recovery is Sebold's indomitable spirit - as she struggles for understanding ("After telling the hard facts to anyone, from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes"); as her dazed family and friends sometimes bungle their efforts to provide comfort and support; and as, ultimately, she triumphs, managing through grit and coincidence to help secure her attacker's arrest and conviction. In a narrative by turns disturbing, thrilling, and inspiring, Alice Sebold illuminates the experience of trauma victims even as she imparts wisdom profoundly hard-won: "You save yourself or you remain unsaved."

First Sentence

In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheatre, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered.

 

Review

Alice Sebold is a powerful writer.  Be it fiction or memoir she has a way of drawing you in with words.  Like The Lovely Bones, Lucky is difficult to read a times.  This memoir is rawer than fiction.  It makes your skin crawl with hurt and revulsion to what is happening.

It is strange to say I enjoyed reading a novel about rape but I did. Alice Sebold makes you feel a roller coaster of emotions and I found it hard to put Lucky down.