Lucky - Alice Seabold

Lucky is Alice Seabold's memoir focusing on the day which transformed her life. She was brutally raped just outside of campus at the age of 18.  This book focuses on what happened, and the trial following, and her struggles following the incident. How people around her didn't know how to act or respond and how her strength got through it. 

Read - I have read previous works of Alice and i wanted to see if this was as good. 

What a fascinating book, very sad and upsetting but also refreshing to see someone write a very frank account of what happened and how they coped.  It was interesting to see how other people reacted to her afterwards, and how the trail and the police  worked around the case.  It's a subject that is so tabooed and hushed up usually but Alice did not want this when it happened to her and her story. 

As a writer Alice can portray what happened in both a frank but also very interesting way, its a compelling read that i couldn't put down.  I found it insightful and it also helped me to understand some of the issues surrounding an incident like this.  It is written in a way it almost feels like fiction, that you cant understand how someone could be so honest and so raw about what happened and the events surrounding it sound almost untrue, but i think that also shows how clever this book is that it does feel like a story and keeps the reader interested and yet somewhat detached from what is going on.  

Obviously this book is quite upsetting as we hear Alice's rape in detail, and then following that we see how her family and friends reacted to it.  She returns to College at the surprise of everyone, and try's to carry on her life as normal. We follow her as she goes to trial, and how she try's to tell others what happened to her, the taboo that surrounds it and how its hard to get back to life as normal.  It also shows just how its hard to report it to the police and how little cases like this actually result in conviction, either because of lack of police training or that women just don't or cant talk about what happened to them.

I would recommend anyone to read this, but with the caution that it is upsetting to read.