Lucky

Rating:
Summary: I couldn' t put it down!
Review: I finished reading Alice Sebold's memoir "Lucky" last week on the recommendation of a friend. Alice has a great writing style that pulls you in from page one and creates a sense that you're there with her. She very articulatly explains her thoughts and story and leaves no questions left unanswered. I highly recommend this book to anyone, but especially survivors of rape or their family and friends. Alice Sebold is an amazing woman.

Rating:
Summary: Great!
Review: A hard look at the reality of rape through the lense of one woman's (the author's) torturous rape and her struggle to get legal justice.

Rating:
Summary: Phenomenal Woman
Review: Gripping read. Helps you understand the true and continual pain of rape survivors.

Rating:
Summary: Strong First Chapter but Started Skipping Pages
Review: One thing in common with the Lovely Bones is the fact that Sebold has an extremely effective and powerful style of grabbing the reader in the first chapter. Even though I knew what each book was about, I found both Lucky and Lovely Bones riviting in their first chapters. However, unlike Lovely Bones, I found myself skimming pages in Lucky to get to the essence of the story. I gave it 3 stars and was contemplating 4 because I was not only compelled to finish it, but found that it stayed with me enough to discuss it with friends. (one friend also agreed with the skimming technique to try to finish). The book is important because Lovely Bones would probably not have been written but for Sebold getting out this story, which is in itself a very powerful story of survival. Something to talk about. . .

Rating:
Summary: Still digesting it but a pretty good read...
Review: This book evokes so many things: acute awareness of your own essential vulnerability, a frustration that must have been shared by her family when the author sinks into self-destructive behavior, an up-close look at the horror of rape, an honest appraisal of just how long it took to reach a degree of equilibrium and healing and so much more.

As someone who has worked with rape victims, I thought that she was indeed "lucky" though it is hopelessly crass and somewhat cop-like that it was pointed out to her. I've taken care of so many rape victims who were never heard in court because they were "imperfect victims"--not virginal, not as beat up, not sober. But ultimately her "luck" was not sufficient to save her from this horrific experience and horrific it was, by any standards. I was horrified by the rapists psychological victimization both at the time of the rape and subsequently. I have no doubt that many victims I worked with experienced this but didn't mention it to me.

...P>The last part of the books does have a "sometime, much later...she gets well" feeling to it. The author who was willing to give us this close up view of her assault withholds the story of her therapeutic work of her learning to feel, learning to deal with her PTSD. But that was, indeed, her perogative. Though I admit to a curiousity about that aspect of her story, I respect her right to not tell that story now or in the future. It's a nice moment of regaining and showing control over what Sebold will let us know and see about herself, an important step in dealing with an event that leaves the victim totally out of control.

This is an important book and I would recommend it freely.

Rating:
Summary: A Memoir of Rare Resilience
Review: When eighteen-year-old Sebold was robbed of her last ounce of normalcy, by euphemisms, 'reasonable doubt' and blue uniforms, her counter strategy was to act like a pro. At that time and fifteen years later.

The result is a testament to a sort of resilience so rare, it makes courage of any other, paper-thin.

Her fearless retelling of how she was brutally raped of her virginity and state of mind simultaneously lends comfort, as an anesthetic would, and leaves one with a numbing throb in the aftermath.

In first-person narrative that is at once disturbing and revelatory, she exposes common misconceptions about rape victims such as their purported wish to be sexually assaulted and the anonymous burden that weighs upon them like the 'near impossible task of acceptance', all this while battling notions of rape and picking up the pieces.

Through sheer grit and an eye for detail, Sebold makes it through the ordeal and lives to tell it like it was yesterday. The steely conviction with which she placed her perpetrator behind bars now translates into a tool of empowerment for readers by way of her profound insights: 'You save yourself or you remain unsaved.'

Rating:
Summary: Lucky
Review: This is a wonderful book. I'm usually not a reader of memoirs and thus my addiction to fiction brought me first to "The Lovely Bones." Sebold's novel, original and beautifully crafted, was one of the best books I'd read in years and her memoir, in terms of writing, is easily its equal. "Lucky," with its unswerving frankness and heartbreaking honesty, surprasses it in many ways. Her themes here are similar -- how violence impacts not only the victim but one's family and friends as well as society at large -- but its deeply personal voice lends it even more power and resonance. I high recommend this.

Rating:
Summary: As Luck Would Have It
Review: You know when you are reading a book and you keep thinking "This is such a great story?" You wonder how anyone thought up such an intriguing story. I am reading Lucky by Alice Sebold. As I read, I want to say "That could never happen," or "Gosh, this is a good story," but then I realize it isn't fiction. This is Alice's story. WOW! I wish it were fiction. I wish nothing like that ever had to happen to anyone.

Rating:
Summary: Engaging, Brilliant, Informative
Review: LUCKY, a memoir of a rape and its aftermath by Alice Sebold, author of THE LOVELY BONES, is a remarkable piece of writing. Twenty-two years ago, the legal and health systems were not attuned to the rape victim and were positioned to make a terrible situation even more dehumanizing. Sebold was lucky, she was told, that the rapist left physical damage to back up her claims, that she was a virgin going into the experience and thus to be accorded more respect, that she wasn't in the same place some days before-in a park near her college campus-when another young woman was raped and killed. Sebold reports the events of the rape in unswerving, unsensational journalistic fashion at the outset of the book. From there she shares something of her childhood in suburban Philadelphia, to help the reader understand who she was and how that helped shape what happened next after the rape, the impact on her family, friends and college community, and on her own choices. Woven in and out of the narrative is the story of how Sebold encounters her attacker on the street months later and pursues him through the legal system. One of the shocking discoveries she makes is how unusual she is in that pursuit; most women were defeated in the process or did not have the wherewithal to initiate it. Sebold probably would not describe herself as courageous, but it becomes apparent, the further you read into the book, that she is very courageous on many levels. She is also downright likeable, though she isn't asking the reader to like her.

It is also apparent that even if our health, emergency, college safety departments, municipal police services, and judicial systems have grown more sensitive to the rape victim in recent years, there remains the problem of how the victim and the people around her make sense and make progress after the event. Emotionally, Sebold was left very much on her own, and while she marches forward, graduating from college on time, accumulating some typical college experiences along the way, it is with some surprise years later that the internal healing process had really yet to begin. As she heads into recovery, Sebold closes the door to outside scrutiny and that's okay: she has already given us what we really need to know.

Rating:
Summary: An unforgettable memoir
Review: It took a great deal of courage for Sebold to write this memoir, which describes her brutal rape as a college student and the subsequent investigation and prosecution of the crime. In spite of the incendiary nature of the crime, Sebold remains largely an objective and composed storyteller, describing events in a detached and methodical manner. It's actually a very interesting true crime story that is hard to put down. The quality of writing is excellent, too. Overall, a very engrossing read. Avery Z. Conner, author of "Fevers of the Mind".