For my summer reading project, I got to choose two books out of six.
For my non-fiction one, I chose "A Child Called 'It'" by Dave Pelzer. This is one on the worst documents of child abuse in California history. This kid has an abusive, alchoholic mother who terribly abuses her oldest son, David, but treats the other children as royalty. She teaches the others to call him "It," and constantly tells him that he is not part of the family-- he only serves as her servant.
He is not allowed to speak unless commanded to. He has to complete every task she assigns on time, or else he's in for a horrible beating, leaving him bruised and bloody. Beatings aren't even the worst for him-- other terrible things his mother has done are forcing him to eat the contents of his baby brother's diaper, forcing him to eat spoonfuls of ammonia, Clorox, and soap, depriving him of food and making him throw up daily to check to see if he's eaten anything, holding his arm over a burning gas stove, smashing his face-first into mirrors, locking him in the bathroom with chemicals mixed to create toxic gas, breaking his arm, purposefully spoiling pork in the refrigerator and have him eat it, and smashing his head against the tile counter to the point where his teeth break.
Luckily, David was taken from his mother by the police. But Richard, one of his younger brothers, wasn't so lucky. He became his mother's next victim in his own autobiography, "A Brother's Journey," where he had bottles of Tobasco sauce poured down his throat and beaten to the point of crying blood and being rushed to the emergency room in an ambulance.
Really hard to imagine this stuff actually happens...
