My good friend Karen Spears Zacharias is a pretty exceptional writer. She also has several pretty exceptional books.
Her latest, A Silence of Mockingbirds, is a very personal memoir of a child abuse murder and a look at the epidemic of child neglect and abuse in America.
Child abuse is arguably easier to spot in other countries and in such horrific things as trafficking and child soldiers. The problems and the injustices of child abuse, however, are just as prevalent in America.
There are many injustices related to children in America that we either don’t see or choose not to see… fatherlessness, the foster system, the plight of the children of illegal or undocumented immigrants, the health of inner-city children (where it’s easier to get strawberry soda than a fresh strawberry), neglected children and young girls at risk for being trafficked or pimped, and, as in the case of Karly, direct emotional and physical abuse at the hands of parents, guardians, or boyfriends and girlfriends.
Child abuse is an uncomfortable reality.
As Zacharias quoting Flannery O’Connor says, however, “Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
Read this well written memoir where Karen Zacharias wrestles with one story where we failed to protect a child, her own connections to such a twisted story and ultimately the broader narrative of our collective culpability in not giving voice to the voiceless in so many instances of child neglect and abuse.
