Rachel

5/10/14: Holy shitballs. Talk about a heart breaking sucker-punch of a book. Everyone needs to read this. Review to come.

2/11/14:
My review, originally posted here: www.thetometravellers.wordpress.com

I’m not quite sure where to start with Fault Line. First of all, this book is about rape and I want to say I’m a little nervous to be writing this review cos I don’t want to come across as being uneducated about rape (I feel like I am though, to be honest). I think everyone should read this book. Everyone. It is about how rape affects the victim – the shame they feel, the blame that gets incorrectly placed on them – and how they change because of it. It is also about how rape affects not only the victim but those closest to them.

I read it on my Kindle in the space of 6 hours. I started around 11pm and finished about 5am. I gotta say, it’s been a fair while since I binge read a book to that time of the morning, but I just could not stop reading.

For me, it was hard to put down because of the way the story unfolds. It’s told from Ben’s POV. It is his girlfriend Ani who gets raped. The first paragraph is a scene set a few months after the rape and then it goes back 6 months earlier and whole story is told from there. So after reading that first paragraph, you know right from the start that Ani and Ben aren’t going to end up in a good place. And it’s so sad because of how their story starts out. They meet, they fall in like, they start dating and they fall in love. And then Ani gets raped. I was reading it and dreading the moment when it was all going to change, but at the same time, I just had to keep reading to find out what brought Ani and Ben to that point.

What I liked:

- The POV: While I did really want to know what was going through Ani’s head at times, I like that Fault Line is told from Ben’s POV. It’s not often that stories involving rape are told from the viewpoint of the person who hasn’t actually been raped. As hard as it is for the victim, I liked that we got to see how hard it was for Ben too.

- The ending: It was abrupt and normally, I hate abrupt endings. And I don’t know why but it just worked for me with this book. Sure, it was left unresolved, but there was going to have to be a lot more words written for me to feel some sort of resolution there and I liked that there was no bullshit ‘he-saved-her-in-the-end’ because you don’t ‘save’ a rape victim. You be understanding. And you be there for them in any way they need.

Christa Desir has written an amazing debut. A complete sucker punch of a book. I think her own personal experiences and work as a rape victim activist really shows here: you feel as if it was written by someone who really knew the topic they were writing about.

Fault Line is such an important book and I’m going to repeat myself here by saying that I think everyone should read it. Everyone.