Interesting read.
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I saw that book on here quite a while ago and looked everywhere to find it, so when I DID find it I devoured the book in a night.
The story itself is hard to explain, it's so different and drawn out that there's no place to start really. As well, Munchausen by proxy (MBP) is something most have no heard of before, myself included.
Overall, the book was a great read. It was interesting, created suspense and also was well written.
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More of a string of events to prove a point
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I didn't find this book to be that captivating. It was an ok story from a survivor of child abuse. However, it lacked a true insight and narrative quality that should go along with memoirs. I found the extra medical inserts to add credibility but that was it. It seemed like Julie really was yearning to prove something in this book, but it fell short of an insightful and good tale. I think what brought me to the end was to see how Julie coped once she figured out there was a psychiatric disease she could label her mother with, but otherwise I found myself rather disconnected with the protagonist of the story.
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Honest and compelling
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It's very rare to find an autobiography about a traumatic childhood that's not contrived, boring, or self-indulgent, but this story by Julie Gregory is not your typical "re-hash" of the early years gone bad. It reminded me of Alice Sebold's "Lucky" - the author manages to take you through her journey of a life with a munchausen by proxy mother without desperately trying to gain sympathy, and yet I felt compelled from the beginning to root for her success. For anyone who enjoys a true personal story, I highly recommend this book.
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Blown Away
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It's hard to know where to start with this book--describing it. On one hand, it's totally unbelievable, yet on the other, I know these things happen. The story is, sadly, nothing that new; we've seen it before in some form or another in the likes of Dave Pelzer with his "A Child Called It," which just destroyed me, or the novel "Bark of the Dogwood" which is, believe it or not, at times funny. But "Sickened," while it is often spoken in the same breath as those books, is different. It deals with MBP syndrome and the mother is really the sick one in this horrifying tale of control and other issues. For those not familiar with MBP, it involves a parent usually making the child sick, or at least claiming that the child is so, in order to get attention for themselves. In this case the mother was willing to have open heart surgery on her daughter just to "get to the bottom of what the problem was." Somebody should have done the surgery on her (the mother) in the head.
If you're easily put off by both physical medical issues and serious psychological ones, you might want to pass on this book. If, however, you want to read a riveting memoir of just how twisted parents can be, then you've come to the right place. Would also recommend the books "A Child Called it," by Dave Pelzer, "Bark of the Dogwood" and "A Man Named Dave," for equally involved reads.
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Voiced in Memoir
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We often ask ourselves "what would make someone act like that?" when we see a mentally or emotionally disturbed individual acting out in abusive ways. However, we rarely ask what the effect will be on the child of such a person. "Sickened" is a book that answers that secondary question under the most brutal of emotional circumstances in which a child does not know they are being abused, in fact they are taught to believe they are being guarded. I cannot do justice to describing the disease depicted in the pages of "Sickened," I leave that to the author. But the short line depiction is that a parent subjects a healthy child to a lifetime of believing they are chronically sick, and the emotional scars that ensue. Readers will most equate "Sickened" with "My Fractured Life" and "Nightmares Echo" in the depiction of both the abuse of parents upon their children and the long lasting affects thereof. The capture point that creates such an inherent bond with the reader is that these authors employ a literary approach of memoir reflection and storyline flow, steering away from clinical analysis and statistical data. The openness draws us in, the raw ness hypnotizes. The experience is life changing.
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