Book Review: Dancing with the Octopus

Dancing with the Octopus

A Memoir of a Crime

by Debora Harding

Bloomsbury USA

Bloomsbury Publishing

Biographies & Memoirs. |. Nonfiction (Adult)

Pub Date 22 Sep 2020

I am reviewing a copy of Dancing with the Octopus/A Memoir of a Crime through Bloomsbury Publishing and Netgalley:

On a winter day, In Omaha Nebraska on November 1978 when Debora Harding, was just fourteen, she was abducted at knifepoint from a church parking lot. She was thrown into a van, abused, and held for ransom. And then left to die as an ice storm fell over the city.

Debora survived went on to identify her attacker to the police and then returned to her teenage life in a dysfunctional home, where she expected to simply move on. Denial became the families means of coping which was offered by her fun loving but conflicted father and her cruelly resentful mother.

It wasn’t until decades later decades later when beset by the symptoms of PTSD that Debora undertook a radical project: she met her childhood attacker face-to-face in prison and began to reconsider and reimagine his complex story. This was a quest for the truth that would threaten the lie at the heart of her family and with it the sacred bond that once saved her.

Deborah Harding untangles the incident of her kidnapping and escape from unexpected angles, offering a vivid, intimate portrait of one family’s disintegration in the 1970s Midwest. By dexterously shifting between past and present.

I give Dancing with the Octopus five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!