Book Review: Ghost Girl by Torey Hayden
Rating: 3.5 stars
Review: I didn't realize until I was several chapters into the book that I had read it before, but enough time had passed that, while several smaller details were familiar to me as I came across them, I'd forgotten much of the big picture. Torey Hayden is a teacher and child psychologist that focuses on emotionally and mentally challenged kids. While there are a handful of them mentioned in Ghost Girl as they are all part of a single, small classroom in a small town, the primary focus for this book is on a little girl Hayden calls Jadie. When Hayden first arrives, Jadie appears to be a deformed and hunched mute, but as her relationship with each child and the class as a whole evolves and tightens, Jadie starts to trust this new adult and gradually reveals her true self. The layers of what she's hiding are shocking and hard to believe.
Like with some of the books by Ann Rule, it's so hard to figure out how to rate books that are telling stories of real tragedies; how to rate what's essentially the entertainment value of someone's life? Some aspects of a rating can certainly be bucketed into things like clarity of the writing and flow of storytelling, grammar errors and such, but then what? Is it a measure of a person's morals to admit to being fascinated when reading about the experiences that happened to this poor kid? The fascination comes, at least in part, because the situations are so completely alien to my thinking and behavior that it the stories seem too fantastical to believe, and yet I know just from reading the news that stuff like this happens, in some form or another, all the time.
How do you put a rating on stories of human suffering? I do it because I'm supposed to for book reviews on the sites I participate in, but I'm not sure it's really an accurate reflection of how I feel when I've finished reading one of these stories. I'm not sure I can accurately articulate that.