Becoming Anna: The Autobiography of a Sixteen-Year-Old

Rating:
Summary: An eye-opening book into the world of child abuse/neglect.
Review: This book provides a new side to the ever present problem of child abuse and neglect. The unique fact about this book is it is written by the adolescent during those horrible times. The author provides an insight to how manipulative parents can be to their community and society around them, even when one of the abusers is supposed to be an individual that is to help those who are victims of abuse. I throughly enjoyed the book. It gave me a chance to see how individuals in the system percieve what is going on.

Rating:
Summary: Poingnant, emotional, thought provoking
Review: This book shares in raw detail life in a mental institution as an adolescent. It bravely shares the horrors and effects of emotional abuse both by family and the mental health system. In my opinion it is a must read for a mental health provider particulary those working with adolescents. Praise for Anna J. Michener and her boldness and courage.

Rating:
Summary: You Won Anna
Review: This book was great. It shows that no matter how adults try to beat some childrend down, the child still has it in them to come out on top. It's not fair that adults think they have the right to do whatever they wish to childrend. Anna made so many points telling us how the world should treat childrend and no one would listen. Debbie was just as bad as the adults abusing Anna, because she know it wasn't right and she was too scared to buck the system. I give all my praise to the Micheners for fighting for Anna, she deserved that just because she was Anna and didn't have to prove herself to anyone. This is an eye opening book for any adult if they will just open their eyes. Just like Anna said just because you have a child it doesn't make you a parent. Remember that all you adults out there reading this book. We as childrend need love, trust, protection, just because we are children and the adult world seems to beleive we have not rights, feelings, that we are just propoirty. That's not ture people, we FEEL too. We need love too. Anna this is such a great book, I hope you continue to write more books, have a happy life and I hope your brother is as luckly as you were to find a loving family. Best wishes.....

Rating:
Summary: Tough But Rewarding
Review: This is a powerful and emotionally draining book. Sadly, the conditions Anna describes in her book are far from unique. Poorly trained and poorly paid workers in state mental facilities end up harming patients more than healing them. This book should be required reading for social workers, psychologists, and others in the mental health field.

Rating:
Summary: Raw, poignant emotion
Review: This is a very painful but important book, and an accurate depiction of the world as it is perceived by children and adolescents. All who work with young people should read this book: teachers, librarians and mental health professionals. I hope that more young people will write about the lives of quiet desperation that they are leading in this country and around the world. I do not care to judge whether this book is the product of a distorted perception of a mentally ill child. Whether Anna was truly mentally ill or not, her words and her pain echoed my own childhood. When children suffer, they may have a tendency to distort what they are perceiving in the world around them, and they may exagerate what they see and experience, but there is no doubt that strange and bizarre and sick things do occur in their lives. The words in this book are written by a child in pain, a child who has no doubt suffered. She should not be judged as to the accuracy of her accounts of her own pain. It is so obviously real. Even if Anna did have a loving home and a loving family, no child in this world is immune to the the sick things that do occur. It is enough to drive anyone to the point that Anna was driven to and that she so poignantly describes in this book. I applaud Anna for her insights into the injustices that children suffer every day. It is a wonder that all children don't go insane.

Rating:
Summary: Anna Tells The Truth and Bares Her Heart!!!
Review: This is one of the most raw, heart breaking, engrossing stories I have ever read.I cried alot during this reading.From personal experience I know what Anna says to be true. There is alot of corruption involved where there is money to be made in the mental health system. Children have no rights against abuse and cruelty of uncompassniate, emotionless, souless, adults who often times work in the mental estabilishments. Alot of people don't want to believe things like this happen but they do. Anna writes from her heart and you get a feeling of intimacy, as if she is reading right to you , she pours her soul out on every page. Her description of the doctors and staff workers are humorous and hard but accurate. Anna speaks for all the young victims who don't have a voice, or who are too traumatized from abuse to write a book.THANK YOU ANNA, and I wish you lots of happiness and success in the future!!

Rating:
Summary: Blows the Lid Off the World of Psychological Abuse
Review: This was a wonderfully well-written book about a terrible subject: the abuse of a young girl at the hands of psychiatrists both in and out of mental institutions. Anna, or Tiffany as she is first called before she changed her name, is not a bad child, but that doesn't matter to anyone: her psychologist grandmother has labelled her "evil" and her ridiculous parents believe it! Tiffany is dragged from one money-grubbing, inept shrink who follows the family's "party line" that she is "bad" or "sick" to another and is labelled all sorts of ridiculous things as the shrinks try to find obnoxious theories to graft onto her. All the while the shrinks are being paid by Tiffany's parents, who do not have her well-being at heart, and are trying to please her parents (and keep the money flowing in) more than they are interested in assisting Tiffany. This is an astonishing book not only because it recounts what was done to poor Tiffany in the name of "psychology" as practiced by idiots but because she lived through it, told the tale, and went on to write it down, thus blowing the whistle on her tormentors. Bravo, Tiffany/Anna! You did a great service to humanity by exposing what was done to you in this book. I hope you have as much good fortune in your own life as you have tried to create for other people by blowing the liff off what was done to you. I also hope the psychological "professionals" out there who find this story have the guts to read it, face themselves and learn from it.

Rating:
Summary: Valuable,Heart-Breaking Account of Child Abuse
Review: [...]P> This is a tragic,defiant testimonial of a young girl who could just as easily be any child abuse victim. The author is accused of telling the story in black and white,of not showing the multi-faceted experience. However,these detractors are overlooking an important literary tact taken by Michener. She is painting a portrait of her account,of child abuse. When one is a victim of such a story,the immediate reaction(the view-point of this novel) is not to consider the moral and cultural implications and drives of her attackers,it is to fight or cower,and such is her response. This is an excellent story for those who have been the victims of child abuse(mental or physical),the American mental health
industry(ha!),or just have a great deal of compassion. Forget the fictional weepies offered by many authors. Part of the horror of this story is that it is real and happening all over this country as we speak. Read this book. You'll be glad you did.

Rating:
Summary: A Remarkable Story; Inadequately Told
Review: _Becoming Anna_ has created widely varying reactions in its readers, as some of the reviews previously posted here have indicated. In trying to read this remarkable book objectively, a number of things not previously dealt with in these reviews become apparent. Anna Michener was obviously an unusually bright, articulate and gifted teenager (she seems to be in her early twenties now). She expresses a great deal of anger in her autobiography, and is quite negatively judgmental of almost all of the adults in her life. In contrast, most of the children and youth about whom she writes (including herself) are viewed very favorably - any flaws are chalked up to their mistreatment by the inevitably "bad" adults around them. The style of _Becoming Anna_ is quite flamboyant and highly descriptive. Unfortunately, the descriptions of even mundane activities share this flamboyance and sometimes verge into inappropriate self-pity and portrayal of the narrator as a victimized, mistreated child, as when she heatedly proclaims, "I even had to do the laundry for my entire family!" Look again at the context of that passage - Anna was 12; her family had four members, the washer and dryer were in the basement, and her mother was disabled. Is having a twelve-year-old do the laundry really so burdensome? The author appears to think so...and makes much of it. The accounts of the author's stays in the two mental hospitals are horrific. Ms Michener very clearly indicates the inadequacy of such facilities - and their staffs. But she piles horror upon horror, and her long list of other hospitalized patients becomes repetitive and wears thin. She could have made her point more succinctly and more effectively. Again, the tendency to melodramatic description overwhelms the message, as in the noted passage concerning the author's hands "reaching for the light", and later, her confrontation with the supposedly negligent and abusive hospital staff in which she heatedly and rhetorically states that she would like to be there when they eventually face God. Her actions and words here appear to be contrived, self-justifying, and a ploy for attention and pity, rather than spontaneous and sincere. Should Anna have been hospitalized? Were her problems all due to familial, and later psychiatric mistreatment? So much of this book seemed contradictory...while many of the stylistic excesses can be attributed to the author's youth (and the lack of adequate editorial advice), it appears that Anna did have some genuine emotional disturbances. She does not dwell upon her constant fearfulness, her violent threats to all the members of her immediate family, or upon the bizarre behavior at school which led to her treatment, or to her self-mutilation and suicidal threats, but she does include them in her book. Taking these things into account along with the extremes of perception (i.e. kids=good; adults=bad) makes me wonder if Anna suffered from borderline personality disorder. Her own descriptions of herself and her perceptions of others meet several of the criteria of this disorder. The author does not go into detail about her diagnosis, and claims that many of the tests which she was given were designed for adults and therefore not applicable to her. But her intense anger, statement that she "just never knew what anyone expected of me", feelings of deep insecurity and of being an outsider, misreading others' intentions and feelings, and most of all, her extremely negative views of her birth family and of most of the other adults in her book, contrasted with the idealized view of herself and almost all the children she encounters (her sometimes-bratty little brother is the only child about whom she briefly expresses what appears to be normal sibling resentment), fit the symptoms of this disorder in a textbook manner. Some of these extremely polarized views can be attributed to the youth of the author at the time this book was written. But if borderline personality disorder is one of the sources of her troubles, how can publishing this book possibly help Ms Michener achieve a more realistic and balanced view of herself and her experiences and those around her? No doubt the actual writing of it was cathartic - the "getting it all out" - but seeing it in print seems to confirm Anna in her dubious role as a mistreated child, rather than help her grow in maturity, personal insight and compassion, and the ability to move on with her life. _Becoming Anna_is an example of a remarkable story, inadequately told. It bears the marks of its 16-year-old author's immaturity and lack of objectivity even as it demonstrates her remarkable descriptive and narrative abilities. Had the author chosen to wait until she matured more fully to write _Becoming Anna_, it would have been a far stronger book, minus many of the flaws and unanswered questions of the existing title. Too bad Anna Michener was ill-advised on this far-too-youthful attempt at "autobiography". It will be interesting to see what her later books are like.