YOU RUINED IT

Dawn processes the consequences of telling her mother and her sibling about what her older cousin did to her.

Her mother is reluctant to tell relatives, including Dawn’s grandmother and absent father, about the rape, but she and Dawn’s sibling, Billie, support her, and the family attends self-defense lessons. Billie feels greater anger and need for revenge than Dawn, who misses bygone days outdoors with her 22-year-old cousin. Handwritten text on lined paper evokes the intimate feeling of a diary. The collage art conveys Dawn’s varying emotional state as she grapples with the aftermath of the assault. Words and images are placed next to or inside circular shapes produced by spirographs to indicate feelings and experiences she asserts or rejects, demonstrating a therapeutic art exercise she learns about later in the story (“what i want goes inside the circle. what i don’t want stays out”). Crossed-out text, including raped and we, reflects her efforts to reckon with what happened and who was responsible. Dawn is gentle on herself and, by extension, on readers who may have been in similar situations. Her acts of self-care, from reclaiming old favorite settings to creating art, demonstrate practical means of healing. Dawn and her family are light-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

This empowering lesson about speaking up and trusting oneself in the wake of trauma deserves to be read widely.