Since her 2009 rescue, Jaycee’s case has continued to break news as government officials issued scathing reports on how she could have been held in plain sight for so long. You just want to cry about Garrido’s parole officers, who did few home visits, ignored positive drug tests, and let him get a job as a door-to-door salesman.
I won’t lie: The first third of the book, the stuff about her kidnapping and early abuse, is profoundly sickening. But, unbelievably, Jaycee keeps hope alive. She plants roses and morning glories around her tent. She is allowed some kittens and lavishes them with love. She keeps a journal full of longing for her mother and dreams of escape (“I would travel around my world on a horse the color of fire with a mane of snow”). She tries to be a good mom, home-schooling her girls with help from the Internet. All throughout, Jaycee’s voice just crushed me. No ghost writer here; her narration uncannily flips between immature (her education stopped at fifth grade, after all) and insightful, as she gains perspective post-rescue, through sessions with her therapist, Rebecca Bailey.
Two other books on kidnapping have also come out this year. This next one is about Adam Walsh. In 1981, a drifter and admitted serial killer with a low IQ approached the 6-year-old at a Sears in Florida - his mother let him play the video game Asteroids for a moment while she asked a clerk about a lamp. The man lured the boy with candy, then abducted, beat, sodomized, and killed him. Les Standiford’s “Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction That Changed America’’ (Ecco, 2011) traces how, after 27 years, the killer was brought to justice by a retired cop named Joe Matthews, who had been kicked off the original investigation. The story is mesmeric and gruesome.
