Dear Laura by Gemma Amor

When Laura is thirteen her best friend, fifteen year old Bobby, disappears. Over the following years she receives letters claiming the writer will return Bobby to her if she follows simple instructions.

It’s an immediately horrible situation. Someone you love vanishes, never to be seen again. The movie, The Vanishing, deals with this subject well. The guilt that consumes the one left behind, and the lengths they will go to in order to find out what happened.

The sad truth is that people vanish all the time, all over the world. While they are often recovered, even decades later, many missing people are never found. Even when killers are caught for their crimes, the bodies of the victims are not always recovered.

Dear Laura uses this as a backdrop, but instead focuses on manipulation. The kind of manipulation that grooms a child to do unspeakable things and breaks a person so that even in adulthood they still can’t escape the chains that keep them prisoner.

This is a horror story in that it takes things that people really do to torture each other and presents the story where there is no hope. It’s realistic, but painfully so.

There is no gore or explicit material in this book. It’s an excellently written psychological study of an abuser and their victim.

I commend Amor for her writing. I understood the motivations of the characters and it never broke my suspension of disbelief, even if I wished for more defiance, more resistance, one little sliver of hope to wriggle it’s way in through all the pain.

I didn’t enjoy reading this book at all, and again that’s to Amor’s credit. It pushed my buttons, made me angry and frustrated and impotent against an abuser, just like Laura. It provoked a strong reaction in me, and the author should be proud.

I award Dear Laura…

Dear Laura is available for $2.70 ebook and $7.50 print book on Amazon.

---

Click here to read my review of White Pines by Gemma Amor