Peter's Lullaby: A Song Without Words That Held a Little Girl's Life Together is the most horrific true story I have ever read, and one of such heartache and pain of a child's remembrance of child abuse that is beyond imaginable. I thought I knew what child abuse was, but reading it in detail, it's not just what we hear or see in the evening news of a child being shaken to death (which is horrible enough). The daily life the author, Jeanne Fowler, went through, including seeing her little brother die is beyond comprehension. Her parents did not hang paintings or their drawings on the wall. They hung their children on walls, in closets and bathrooms, for days at a time. It was her brother, Peter's hushed lullaby that he would sing after a beating…show more content… The memoir begins with the author describing the last few moments of being `hung' in her closet before police and firemen arrived to rescue her and her siblings from unbearable torture. Fowler describes with great detail the blood soaked cloth that held her wrists tied above her head and the resulting pain to her shoulders from having to endure such a position repeatedly. In this opening chapter we are given a clear picture not only of the physical abuse suffered but also the psychological damage done to her and her siblings. As the author's sister Jill screams terrified at the sight of the officers and their attempts to rescue them, it is Fowler's words that help us to understand the twisted and scarred mental landscape that is the abused child's mind. From this first chapter, the author moves to telling her story in chronological order having advised readers of her reliance upon official records to make up for information not remembered or never before known to produce a coherent story. We follow the author through her earliest memories as a three year old child being beaten with a belt by her mother for some unknown reason, to the birth of her brother Peter, and what she and her siblings had to endure at the hands of mentally unbalanced alcoholic
