Guest Post by Julie Wu
I have never struck a child. I would like to think I never would, no matter what. No matter if I had been born in 1920, had eight children, an absent husband, and lived in an occupied country during World War II. I would like to believe that there is a huge, unbridgeable gulf between “a child abuser” and someone like me.
And that belief is a problem, because one of the characters in my book, The Third Son, does beat her son. Repeatedly. She singles him out, even siphoning food from him to her other children until he becomes malnourished. “I don’t understand why she’s so mean,” my readers have said, reading my drafts over the years.
I have worked hard to make all my other characters well rounded, believable. In a previous draft of my book, the narrator was [Read more...]
