I received an advance review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This was a difficult book for me to read. I felt for Annie throughout. Everything seemed to be going well for her until her mother asked for a divorce and left her father, taking the children with her. Her mother had issues with mental illness. She seemed to be very self-centered and selfish. They moved around a lot. Annie endured a great deal of emotional, psychological, and physical abuse at the hands of her mother, stepfathers, and temporary caregivers. Her siblings were also abused. Annie had no self-confidence or feelings of self-worth. She feels she is “bad.” So much cruelty. She was expected to perform many of the adult household chores and was told over and over again that she couldn’t do anything right. She ran away from home a few times but always ran into a police officer that looked out for her and brought her back home. The mother had several boyfriends and was married several times. What I never understood was that throughout the story Annie’s father visited them very little and was seldom mentioned. Her mother was very hostile toward him when he did visit. Even though the abuse is very difficult to read about I recommend reading this book to see how Annie prevails in the end and that children do have feelings. The author presents a realistic picture of the life of an abused child. ( )

As many as nine out of ten cases of physical child abuse go unreported every year in this country. That’s just the physical abuse, the breaking, bruising, burning version, where there is evidence, substance. Reports of neglect and outright emotional abuse are rarer, because they’re not really a crime, at least not the kind that gets prosecuted. Sure, neglect if severe enough can rouse the snoozing bureaucracies that are charged with protection of children. But who ever reported someone for just being downright mean to their kids, for treating them like so much trash. And the effects, while not visible, are far deeper – spirits mend slowly, if at all.

I’m not sure Solla Carrock set out to write a book about child abuse, at least not in-your-face, tell-all kind of expose. But The Things that Always Were is a subtle revelation about the interior world of an abused child. It’s Annie’s story, told in her voice and her thoughts. Annie, and her siblings, Danny, Renee, and Sammy, live with their mother, if you use the term ‘live with’ very loosely. The story covers three years, between 1959 and 1962. The summer of 1959 finds the children leaving Yakima with their mother, who’s just split up from their father. Soon, their mother checks herself into a mental facility and leaves them with the Willis family. The Willis farm is a hard place and the Willises are hard people. The kind of people who spank a child or frighten him with stories of his penis falling off for wetting the bed. Annie and the other kids are of free labor and a constant target for anger and bitterness at the farm. Eventually, their mother returns and moves them back to Yakima with Ray, another hard man, free with harsh words and the belt. Annie ends up being the target of most of the abuse, both physical and emotional. She is constantly made to feel that she can’t do anything right, even though she is expected to accept much of the adult responsibility in the household.

What’s special about Carrock’s account of Annie’s life over this three year period is the deftness in layering Annie’s life with the symptoms of abuse without hitting you over the head with them. The emotional content of Annie’s story is significantly dulled or absent altogether at times. Throughout the first half of the story, the absence is deafening. When you begin to match that loss of emotional communication and understanding with Annie’s social withdrawal, lack of self-confidence, and her avoidant mentality, you begin to get the point. But Annie perseveres, eventually finding her voice in school and in faith. She identifies her inner strength and grace,
“Maybe that was what grace meant, when you aren’t studying or memorizing or doing something that you know will be thought good. Maybe when you try something, that you’d like to hide for awhile, because you kind of like it, but you aren’t sure of it. But someone sees it, and they see you. And they think it is good too. Then you can feel it, the grace that is in you, that you didn’t have to do anything to get.”
Annie also eventually begins to see that she is not a bad kid, not a failure and screw-up, but that she has suffered for her mother’s own insecurities and selfishness,
“I figure, everyone has their one story they keep telling themselves over and over again, about who they are and what their life is. My mother has two stories, but they are really just one. Her story is: ‘I never got what I really wanted.’ And my story, maybe it’s the one about having a mother whose story is, ‘I never got what I really wanted,’ and how she took out all her hurt and pain on me. But I wonder what could happen if I told myself a different story, or even more than one.’

That Carrock’s Annie is a survivor when not all victims of abuse are survivors is not a fault for The Things that Always Were. Perhaps because Annie survives but doesn’t triumph, she merely begins to understand and grow – remember, this is no in-you-face expose. It’s just an honest book that subtly tries to find the truth in everyday life.

The Things that Always Were is not a perfect book. The lack of emotion in the first half of the book makes it hard to connect with the story, and with Annie. If there had been some connection with Annie’s plight before she is already changed by the abuse, it would be easier to care about her. But the faults of the book are overcome by its strengths. Annie’s voice is perfect, and Carrock never breaks from writing in her voice. And Carrock’s subtle touch is a gift in the midst of a topic that is rarely addressed with subtlety.

Bottom Line: A subtle, honest book about abuse and a perservering spirit.

4 bones!!!!! ( )

The Things That Always Were by Solla Carrock (a longtime online friend), has proven difficult for me to review. I promised Solla a review months and months ago. But months passed; still no review....

The Things That Always Were made me tear up multiple times. If I were being honest, I'd confess it made me cry multiple times. Reading about so much cruelty inflicted on kids, whether by birth parents, foster parents, strangers or anybody, gnaws at me. Makes me mad when it's not making me so sad. Solla Carrock is quite brilliant in this regard: navigating her novel through this childhood quagmire of confusion and polarized, highly charged emotions, with her sensitive narrator-heroine, Annie, at the helm. Courageous Annie, who despite not being the perfect little angel (she's shoplifted and run away from home repeatedly -- that's her on the book cover escaping from home yet again) does not deserve being the family scapegoat or recipient of the bulk and certainly the worst of her mentally ill mother's (Barbara) violence and psychological abuse. Barbara, however, will often -- and irrationally -- rant otherwise. Poor Annie, too young not to internalize her mother's lies, spends time she should be playing, just being a kid, thinking about how to appease her mother or how to hide instead.

Carrock's prose is soaked richly in the sweetest melancholy, the result perhaps of how taut she maintains the novel's tension between optimism and despair in the hurting mind of Annie. Thank God for books in Annie's life. A constant refuge. Though for her sake I wish she didn't so easily identify with that O. Henry story of the inmate who wakes up from a bender, remembers something about a gun, and feels cold dread as he realizes the detective isn't buying his story about the bullet from his gun just ricocheting off somehow when he shot it in the air. Annie, in trouble yet again (and this time the police were involved) felt that same dread as O. Henry's drunk, "...waiting for my parents to come. If they'd hit me before for washing dishes too slowly, or not getting every single one of them clean, what would they do to me now? The fear of that was all I had to think about. Well, almost all. Because the other thing I thought about was the young policeman and how he'd looked at me like I was just a regular kid, a good Catholic kid even. It had seemed like I was so bad that anyone could see it, my parents, my grandparents, but he hadn't seen it."

Annie is surprised not being perceived as "bad" by the cop. That's just one subtle example of how Carrock mines these labyrinths of psychological dysfunction the result of parental neglect and mental illness in the consciousness of her character whose awareness of the wrongness of her abuse is slowly dawning. Carrock's handling of the quiet consequences of abuse inside the mind of a child are poignant and uncannily astute. Annie's voice is as authentic as the raging voices who brutalize her. Her suffering is conveyed as if it's matter-of-fact. It's never sensationalized or gratutious; no, it's normalized -- the way it really is in so called real life for abused kids -- and its this "normalcy" of abuse (which should be abhorrent to a parent), that adds a nuanced touch of terror to what is already horrific. The rationalizations behind the abuse are as equally authentic and blasé; so blasé it's maybe unintentionally twisted at times -- Barbara's demented reasoning in the "disciplining" of her child -- and it makes me cringe and not want to go on writing about it, reading it again. After enduring a litany of demands and double-binds in which Annie cannot possibly win; and after she is berated by an increasingly shrill and scary Barbara for not doing the dishes perfectly or just right, witness a not unusual mother-daughter moment in their kitchen:

The pressure cooker sat on a burner. She took off the lid and looked inside. "This pressure cooker is not clean. How long were you going to leave this pressure cooker on the stove dirty like this?"

"I thought it was clean," I said.

"How could you think it was clean when you're the one that washed it and left it dirty like this?" ... She banged the lid back down on the pressure cooker and twisted the lid back on. She picked up the pressure cooker by its handle and said, "Here, you wash this again," and she flung it out....

The pressure cooker hit me in the mouth...I felt my teeth breaking....

Mama said, "Now, if you've gone and made me break your teeth again, I'm going to be really angry."

Scenes like that are partly why I've had a hell of a time finishing something that could pass for a promised "review". Beyond the horror of the all-too-real and universal content of the novel, the biggest challenge I think Solla Carrock set for herself in writing The Things That Always Were, was conveying those stifled and often complexly puzzling emotions and reactions of Annie (like when she'd attempt to understand or even defend the abusive behavior of her mother) -- realities already complicated by her parent's divorce and her mother's mental illness -- within the surface context of a sweep-it-under-the-carpet ethos of the late Fifties and early Sixties who's trusted institutions of authority, be they the Holy Catholic Church, police or school, collectively turned a blind eye to obvious abuse. And then to convey all that chaos through the naturally limited point of view of an innocent girl entering a time of life in adolescence that's already bewildering enough for anybody to figure out or survive even under ideal conditions, speaks convincingly, I suspect, to Solla Carrock's introspection and intuition, and to her accomplishment, there is no doubt, that will always be The Things That Always Were. ( )

Disclaimer: I know this author and we are friends.

This book is hard for me to review. It is told from the perspective of a young girl. Her parents are divorced and her mother has mental issues and a rather unsettled life. She is the oldest of several children. As her mother moves from one place to another, she tries to cope with the problems she and her siblings face. She is such a wonderful character, and she is so strong. Her mother and other caregivers do so many hurtful things to her, but she never loses that core of self knowledge that keeps her sane. I am reminded of characters in Roald Dahl.

I read this book in manuscript about two years ago. It stayed with me because it comforts me. My own marriage was kind of difficult for me and my children had a similar situation with their father, and I am very sad about that. The message in this book is that a child can overcome these unfair and awful events and tell her own story, and triumph. In a way. And this is a message I really need to hear, over and over. So, life can be awful, but there is always hope.

The writing is strong and evocative and the printed book is beautiful. Author Solla Carrock is also a talented artist and designed the cover art. It is available on Amazon as well as in ebook formats. I will always treasure this book and will reread it often. Highly recommended. ( )