paperdollmom

Written by: W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

I am somewhat torn about writing this review. I was really excited to finally get my hands on one of these books in this series, as I am a fan of historical fiction novels, and I love Native American cultures and belief systems. This book is really well written, about a witch that is known as a legend amongst the tribes, who raids villages and steals children to put into slavery. There are terrible stories about how badly she treated the children, and those fears are once again rising, as she is now back and has abducted children from several tribes. This book is about the horrors that the children experience, and the trials the parents of these children go through while trying to track and find where there children have been taken. I love reading about their culture, beliefs, legends, and anything about their way of life. The authors share so much of this throughout the novel, it is wonderful. However, along with their way of life was much violence, and the writers really did not hold back anything. I will say there are some pretty harsh scenes when learning about what the children are dealing with, even a pretty detailed scene of several men raping the children that have been abducted. I found some of these scenes quite disturbing to read and with my caged thinking that plagues me due to having OCD, I had a tough time shaking them off. I got about half way into the book and had to stop and reassess if I should read on. Even though I really wanted to get to a happy ending and (hopefully) find the children back with their parents again, I really just couldn't read more about the harsh treatments of children. I guess it is sort of a soft spot for me, and I would have much preferred a PG version.

I am a quite a bit disappointed, as I was looking forward to digging into this series, but I am guessing that the violence will probably run through all of these books on some level, probably a level I wont want.

Would I recommend this book? Sure, but I would suggest you understand the specific type of violence this book gets into, and if you can stomach such a thing, the plot is really interesting and well written.