Book Review: My Hero is My Monster

Title: My Hero is My Monster
Author: June Spears
Genre: Short Story, Non-Fiction
Publisher: Self-Published
Publication Date: July 10th 2012
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Review copy provided by the author in exchange for honest review.

A young girls childhood is stolen when her Hero becomes the monster in her bed everynight.

My Hero is My Monster is a short story of about eleven pages long, so naturally, this review will be short as well. This book is a true account of the downward spiral of events that make a young girl’s life go from hell to worse. One night, when she’s only four years old, her father, the man who was supposed to be her hero, who was supposed to love her and look after her and keep her safe from all the evil in the world, does the unthinkable. He takes away her innocence, her trust and everything she ever believed in.

This book is cruel, gruesome and terrible. It’s honest, disturbingly so, and its strength is its honesty and brutality. I applaud the author for her courage to tell us this story, which is non-fiction, a memoir of sorts. The story is straight-forward, without flowery language to hide the cruel truth. For telling this story alone, the author would get my full five stars. Unfortunately, there were some easy-to-catch typos I saw, and since this book is fairly short, I would think it could benefit from another quick spellcheck, so I deducted a star for that, hence the four stars.

I’m glad this is a short story though. I have no idea how much else I’d been able to cope with. Child abuse is always horrible, and when the facts are laid bare without covering anything up, that makes it all the more difficult to stand.

This book is painful to read, but it is a must-read. I would recommend My Hero is My Monster to everyone, although I do advice to keep it away from children. Some of the scenes in this book obviously aren’t suitable for little kids. But I recommend it to all young adults and adults. It’s worth taking a look at.