Halfway through this book I realised that it was not, as I had blithely assumed, a novel. Obviously the notion of a father seducing his own daughter is one so repugnant that the mind prefers to file it under "fiction"; but this is the story of what actually happened to Kathryn Harrison when her estranged father reappeared in her life when she was 20 years old and became physically and emotionally obsessed with her. She eventually emerged from under his spell and into marriage and a family, and recalls her years of enslavement in a cleverly detached manner which, while managing to suggest that the events happened to someone else, still administers to the unwary reader the literary equivalent of a slap in the face.
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