Thanksgiving for Canadians has come and gone and for many of my friends in the US it will be coming up very shortly.
For many families, this is a time of getting together, sharing our time, our joys and our losses through the year behind us and looking forward to the year ahead.
But, that is for most "normal" families! What happens when you don't belong to that "kind" of family.
Sins of the Family is a true story about a dysfunctional family with secrets that are over 100 years old and that have managed to tear this family apart.
What if your family was rife with mental illness or an inability to cope with their truth and history? What if your own granddad and your mother did nothing to stop your Gran from behaving the way she does?
Felicity lives in this situation! She takes abuse from her Gran on a daily basis. She is beaten and verbally abused everyday. She doesn't know why Gran is so mean and abusive. As a small child she really didn't know that this wasn't "normal". Standing for an hour or more switching on a light and switching it back off again, until she got it right, was a common torture forced on her by her Gran!
Only once in a blue moon would her Grandad come to her rescue, raising his voice to her. Her mother was never one to raise any objection to the way Gran treated Felicity, because if she complained, she would be the next target!
One woman's power over this family has done so much damage.
Can Felicity ever figure out what a normal life looks like and how to get out from the crazy place she calls home?
This book is an eye opener and Felicity does start to find some answers after digging into her family's history.
Let's just say, it's not a pretty picture at all!
I don't want to give away too much about Felicity's life, but suggest that this is a really interesting book. Never having had any of the experiences that she had, gave me some new insights into other people's lives that I have never even considered before.
This book will leave you shaking your head and wondering how this could happen in our day and age!
Yet I'm sure that it does happen and probably happens more often than we ("normal") people think
It is clear to me that we can never, ever judge other people because we just don't know what makes them tick and what they have been through. All our experiences shape our lives and Felicity is no different in that.
This book has made me glad that I have a "normal" family with problems that we discuss or work out! Thanksgiving is for giving thanks and after this book I will give thanks much more often. Understanding and forgiveness are two of the biggest steps you need to take to move forward!
I hope you take the time to read this book!
