The Fifth Sister: From Victim to Victor - Overcoming Child Abuse by Laura Landgraf | Inspirational Memoir & Self-Help Book for Survivors, Therapists & Advocates | Healing Journey & Empowerment Guide

THE FIFTH SISTER by Laura Landgraf Oakland, CA Empower PressThis book will surely become required reading in many a college psychology course. The author not only survived childhood sex abuse and parental violence, but overcame it and ensured the ongoing safety of her own two children.A page turner to the very end, this story has most of the attributes of a prize-winning novel, but is nonfiction. (I know the author personally and her present husband.) Basically, her father—a school teacher, church pastor and strong disciplinarian—was also a serial child molester, and her mother enabled him,in order to keep the family's reputation unsullied. At some point he violated each of his five daughters (three of them adopted) besides having other extramarital affairs.Laura divides her narrative into three sections: one from her viewpoint at age 10, the second as a teenager, and the third as an adult. In her teen-age years as a missionary kid in Ethiopia, she became fluent in the native language, capable in medical first aid, and later became a licensed pilot. In contrast, her four sisters were unable to cope with the family dysfunction.I had two issues with this book (other than the emotional turmoil I experienced while reading it): First, what could the mission organization possibly have been thinking, continuing to employ Laura's father as a Christian missionary, when (by the reply Laura's mother got from the mission's American headquarters) they must have been aware of serious family problems? Why were the father's talents as a speaker and fund-raiser so important that the family situation was ignored until the American Embassy in Ethiopia later forced the parents to leave?Secondly, I was surprised at the story's sudden ending, although I understood it better after reading on through to the last page. This is a true story, not fiction; no denouement required. Instead she asks us, as readers to consider twenty-one questions to make us think seriously about our attitude toward maintaining secrecy versus blowing the whistle.