Sunday, June 10, 2012

Black Rose: Diary of a Teen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hate, violence, homophobia, pedophilia, incest, and rape, are all things that blacken this young boy's earliest years. However, buried under such sinister events, is a beautiful story of young gay teenage love, and it's struggle to survive in the midst of all this chaos. Black Rose is printed untouched and unedited in it's entirety, in the teenager's exact words.


 
The short summary above of the book should prepare you for the content of it. I located this book on amazon while browsing for potential reads in the YA genre and snagged it up, but without realizing how it would completely absorb me and have me strung out for days. I'm going to give the warning that this one is HEA in any shape or form so be reading when and if you decide to tackle it.

Eddie's few years of life are told by him in first person within his diary are very emotional, not uplifting and very distressful. My mind is cracked between liking this book and hating it. It's a very fine line and barrier that you as the read will come to your own conclusion on.

After having read this extremely traumatic story I want to OD on antidepressants for the simple enough reason that it's dark and foreboding in every sense of the word. The combination of cruelty, scenes of rape, abuse, battery and substance abuse is fawking overwhelming and all wrapped up into the pages of this short book.

As you can see by my review it's not a light read by any means, but rather very heavy. From the first page you start reading, be ready for the roller-coaster ride of Eddie's days of torment, loss of love, having no hope and finding a way out of it all in order to cope with the hand that life has dealt him. A heavy blow. The injustice throughout that one boy has to face is incomprehensible, disbelieving, but it's the story it is.

I was moved to tears constantly by the sorrow, the trauma, the hurt that could be felt coming out of the words written within his diary on the daily accounts that Eddie has documented. I won't deny that it's been 4 days since I've read the book and I'm still distressed and distraught when thinking about it, hence the reason I procrastinated on writing up this review. With a heavy heart at that.

The author did an exceptional job with this book, but I have to wonder and ask myself how they themselves got through with writing this one.






No comments:

Post a Comment