For God's Sake, Don't Just Stand There!! DO SOMETHING!!

David Pelzer is a survivor. He is my hero. He is also one of few seriously abused children who miraculously made it to adulthood. This painful emotional true story, A Child Called It, is the first of a trilogy describing in vivid, horrific detail the child abuse suffered by David from the hands and feet of his own mother!

I had heard a great deal about this book prior to reading it. My daughter gave it to me as a mother's day gift so I began to read it. Immediately, from page one to the last page, my heart went out to David. Poor little David! How could anyone, especially one's mother, verbally, physically and emotionally torture a child? For me, the absolute worst of the tortures was the gas-chamber "game" of punishment. David's mother, a very sick, disturbed alcoholic, would put David in the bathroom with a liquid brew of bleach and ammonia in a bucket. She would lock the door leaving the poisonous fumes to burn his eyes and throat rendering him unconscious.

Some of the other difficult to believe punishments included forcing David to eat his own regurgitated food that he had stolen from school and had to eat frozen!! His mother took pleasure in starving him as a means of showing him that he meant nothing to her. In fact she told him more times than I care to mention here how much she hated him and wished that he were dead! She made little five year old David do most of the house hold chores on a time limit. He was in essence, her slave and treated worse than a dog! If he was unsuccessful in completing his chores in a timely fashion, he would not eat that night!! Or the next and possibly several nights and mornings after that!!

I was very disturbed while reading this book. What angered me the most is the fact that too many "outsiders" knew about the abuse, and for one reason or another, chose to sit back and ignore it. David's father was also trapped in this sick family, but his behavior angered me probably more than the mother's. I feel this way because David's father was also a victim, but he was an adult who could have left at any time and saved David.

This book is a real tear jerker. Make sure you have plenty of Kleenex when reading this one. You will find yourself praying that someone will stand up and make things right for David. You will start to question how anyone can stand by and not help a suffering child. You will begin to understand the depths and seriousness of child abuse in America. You must read this amazing autobiography to find out how David was finally saved.

I highly recommend reading this book and passing it on to your own children to read, when the time is age appropriate. My teenaged daughter is reading it now. We all must take a stand in trying to stop child abuse.

God bless you David!