Freedom: My Book of Firsts

Gentle, thoughtful, and hopeful: honest descriptors for this second book by Ms. Dugard. Full of discovery and of new insights into the benefits and sometimes frights of liberty, this nicely crafted tale is a kindly read.

The lady fills pages with her family, including her beloved mother, her maturing daughters, and friends. Those friends include two women who have been her therapists, some horses, dogs, and kitties.

Adventures range from a first unaccompanied airline flight, complete with being stranded in a strange city, to visits to windy Ireland and tropical Belize.

Dugard has formed a foundation to aid others in recovery. And using that institution as a platform, she has challenged the concept of Stockholm Syndrome as a patronizing stigmatization. She vehemently refutes the concept of captives necessarily coming to love their captors. To aid this, she offers a pungent description of the sheer repulsiveness, both mental and physical, of her own kidnapper and rapist.

Even with so very much fuel, she refuses to light the fire of hatred, eschewing the self-destructiveness of that indulgence.

Freedom ends on notes of hopeful anticipation. I am better for having read this, and I will now seek out the author’s first book, A Stolen Life. I may also seek out Scott’s Shattered Innocence.