A review by liralen
The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys by Marina Chapman
3.0
One has to wonder how much easier she might have had it had she been older -- and also how much of her survival is attributable to her age. On the one hand, the older one is the more basic survival skills one is likely to have picked up; on the other hand, her age probably played a part in her willingness to mimic other creatures, and her small size probably made her less threatening to the monkeys.
There's so much more I wish I knew (much of which I suspect the author couldn't tell anyway), but also numerous places where I wondered how much was memory and how much was reconstruction of what must have happened -- not any kind of accusation, but reaching back that far for memories must be difficult.
The subtitle doesn't lie -- it is an incredible story, not least because for the first half (survival in the jungle) but also for the terrible circumstances of the second half (life in a brothel, on the streets, etc.). It's also amazing to think that so many people could get away with treating a child so terribly. (Can you imagine the response today if a child was found, wild, in the woods of, say, the Canadian interior?) It'll be interesting to see whether she does follow up with a post-reintegration book.
There's so much more I wish I knew (much of which I suspect the author couldn't tell anyway), but also numerous places where I wondered how much was memory and how much was reconstruction of what must have happened -- not any kind of accusation, but reaching back that far for memories must be difficult.
The subtitle doesn't lie -- it is an incredible story, not least because for the first half (survival in the jungle) but also for the terrible circumstances of the second half (life in a brothel, on the streets, etc.). It's also amazing to think that so many people could get away with treating a child so terribly. (Can you imagine the response today if a child was found, wild, in the woods of, say, the Canadian interior?) It'll be interesting to see whether she does follow up with a post-reintegration book.