To Love No More

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorCollege, Undergraduate April 2001

download word file, 2 pages 0.0

Downloaded 930 times

For my book report I read the book To Love No More by Carley Jefferson. This book deals with sexual abuse. It is about a family consisting of a mother, father, two daughters and son. For the daughters, Chrissy and Michele, whole life the father, Chuck, has sexual molested them. Not till the end does the mother and son, Jared, find out.

Chrissy is eight years old and Michele is five years old. They both share a room. At night their father would come in to the room and touch them in unapporiate places. Both girls knew this was wrong but because the father made threats, they never said anything. He would say if you tell you'll get in trouble or our family will break up and it will be your fault.

This effected both girls in school. Their teachers noticed they withdrew from the rest of the class and they often seemed depressed.

Because of this both girls didn't have good relations with the other peers in the class. In gym class Chrissy wouldn't want to change. All these signs could show sexual abuse.

I find it hard to believe that the mother and son never caught on, but I think they had some idea. The son, Jared often questioned why dad always had to have "special time" with Chrissy and Michele. But since Chuck was such a good father to Jared, what ever his father said he went along with. I think that the mother is to blame for this too because she never knew what was going on. How can you not realize that something like that is happening in your home, unless she just didn't want to know.

Finally one day in school the teacher was giving a lesson to Chrissy's class on different kinds of abuses. She listened, learned and decided to tell someone. She ended up telling her teacher everything and then right away the teacher reported it to the social worker. The social worker took it from there.

I liked this book because it gave good information on the signs to look for in a sexual abuse case. Sexual abuse signs are probably the hardest to notice but over time they will appear. The ending of the book was happy. The father got arrested and the children stayed with their mother where they were safe.