Book Reviews

Book Blurb

Charles is 14, and after being discovered with his first love he is forced into a mental hospital to cure his sexuality. For the next ten years he endures mental and physical torture as part of that treatment and when he is finally free, he begins a relentless quest for vengeance against the woman who abetted his commitment, his mother Charlotte.

The Value of Rain chronicles Charles’s journey from hate to the unexpected beginning of redemption, and reveals the destructive nature of families, secrets and revenge.

Half the proceeds from this book are donated to LGBT Youth Charities.
Chosen by Indie book bloggers as a "Best in LGBTQ Fiction for 2011" and a "Top Read of 2011."

 

Book Review

The emotions this story wrought in me left me silent and dazed, drained of all usefulness until I could ruminate on my responses. The writing is stunningly beautiful and reminiscent of Southern authors such as Harper Lee, Flannery O'Connor, and Pat Conroy with all its subsequent family hatred and love. Interwoven within this prose is one man's horrific struggle of revenge against the one person who should have loved him unconditionally.

Charles is fourteen years old when he is caught in compromising circumstances with another boy. Thrown away by his mother, Charlotte, to a mental institution, he spends the next ten years enduring the worst that humans can do to one another, suffering through electric shock, beatings, and abuse. But it is there that he also meets some of the gentlest people he will ever know, lost in their delusions and drugs. Released, finally, from the institution, Charles struggles to live free, staying with the father he's just met. But when that father dies, Charles flees to New Orleans attempting to discover any secrets he can about his mother to use against her in his vengeance.

I've never met someone as consumed with hate and bitterness as Charles is. It feeds him, appears to have always fed him. His relationship with his mother is frightening in its intense disgust, rage, and overwhelming need to exact revenge on her, not just for his confinement, but also for the deaths of people he consigns to her responsibility because those men loved him and Charlotte couldn't allow that. In his hatred and revenge he doesn't seem to realize that he's made himself into a mirror image, a twin, of his malicious mother.

This beautiful story made me think. It made me cry. It made me mourn. It made me cry.

 

 

 

 

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Additional Information

Format	ebook and print
Length	Novel, 215 pages
Heat Level
Publication Date	23-July-2011
Price	$4.99 ebook, $12.99 paperback
Buy Link	http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005KBQC0Q/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_G23xob083B5SP