Recognizing Beauty: "Only in suffering do we recognize beauty." Marcel Proust

"For it is in suffering that one recognizes beauty." This book is intriguing and offers insightful stories about family abuses.

Little Cyndi is an overactive child exploring the world in the only way she knows how. While doing so she is the object of abuse physically, sexually, and psychologically. Cyndi is stuck in a world where there is no way out. This abuse begins in infancy and she tells of it in her own language trying to understand what is happening to her and why.

Her parents are extremely young with their own abusive backgrounds. They just don't know what to do about Cyndi because she's into everything and is nothing like her older sister who is a hard act to follow. There is no end in sight for Cyndi since she is the object of their anger. Christian Fundamentalism is thrown into the mix and little Cyndi carries all these things on her small little shoulders.

One wonders if she will make it out alive and psychologically sound. She looks to others for help but she is sworn to silence.

This memoir is insightful and anything but boring. One wants to know what will happen to little Cyndi next. What goes on in the mind of an abused child becomes a wonderful discovery for the reader as the book unfolds.