Review: Sad account of triumph over adversity
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 11 3, 2012
This is a sad little story and, though it ends reasonably happily, this is surely just a comparison of less horrible with horrible. I will have to read the next part to see exactly what happened to Mary and how she triumphed more permanently over adversity, which hopefully she did.The account of all Mary went through hinges on the idea that she must save herself and her baby sister from being taken into care. Perhaps the 'care' of her childhood was more to be feared, as she says, because she really had no idea what it involved. This made the idea seem to be a kind of monster to her. But it's hard to see how she could have fared worse had she gone into care than during that period at home.Perhaps life afterwards did get better - she certainly seems to have liked school, which I would have thought would have fallen by the wayside in the hunt for food for herself and her sister. But it's hard to imagine that her neglectful parents suddenly turned into angels and that the rest of her childhood became a fairy story. I'm guessing that having to beg for food, not just for yourself but also for your parents, would leave a permanent mark of low self-esteem.What is so haunting is to think that there are children out there now suffering in the same way, not just those in foreign countries we hear so much about. Such children really are invisible, as the subtitle suggests, unless notoriety catches up with the family and the story appears in the newspapers to be tsk-tsked about.