Book Review – The Girl In The Treehouse

“The Girl In The Treehouse” will immerse you into the author’s world of beauty and heartache, innocence and doubt, despair and unshakable hope. Let this book take you on a journey from Jennifer’s wounded childhood to her job with special children, from her traumatic escape from a serial killer to her many years of struggle towards healing.

Raw, honest and heart-wrenching! The author has opened a portal to a deep and powerful place where only the courageous can dare enter in. A revelation, not only of one’s life but of one’s soul.

This book is not for the faint of heart. It isn’t a self-help book that would tell you what you should and what you should not do. It isn’t for those who expect safety and perfection. It will not take you there. It will take you instead to where childhood dreams must be shattered and cast away. It will take you to where trust is repaid by the utmost kind of betrayal. It will take you at that very point where you start to question just how much pain the human heart could possibly bear.

Not that all such darkness isn’t interspersed with light, because it is! But that’s what really tears your heart apart.

Through everything Jennifer had to suffer, she has almost always found a way to see the good things that still remain. We see how art, imagination and a bit of humor has helped her find an escape where there seemed to be none. We see how despite everything she suffered, she could still find the strength to forgive, to hope, to love.

Jennifer told her story with such a frankness and openness of heart that she left herself vulnerable to all of us who may try to judge her actions or past decisions, and that we can do. We can examine her life, but we can only do so as we also judge and examine our own.

What prompts people to act the way they did? What were the consequences of those actions? When we really look through the eyes of the author, we see not only the impact of her life and her decisions on others. We also see how each person from her childhood to the present has helped shape her own life.

It is dangerous to see everything in black and white and not see the many shades and colors in between. This is where Jennifer has succeeded. She has painted a story of her own life in a canvas that speaks far more than what we can initially see. I guess life is like that. Life is not made up of just one layer of story, but layers upon layers of truth interwoven together in a tapestry that we can only appreciate when seen as a whole.

Jennifer’s story has not yet ended, but she has allowed us to look deep within it, painfully deep in all its lights and shadows. She has welcomed us into her “Treehouse”, into that place where she can be broken and healed, where she can bleed, and laugh and start over again.

In the end, I believe it was never Jennifer’s task to be the perfect role model. Her task had always been to be the voice of those who cannot speak for themselves – to be a storyteller, and that she has done very well.

Book Review by:
Jocelyn Soriano, Self-Help Author and Book Reviewer
(www.itakeoffthemask.com)

Check Jocelyn's books:

"Of Waves and Butterflies: Poems on Grief", "Mend My Broken Heart", "Questions to God", "To Love an Invisible God", "Defending My Catholic Faith", and more - click here.

(You may freely quote excerpts from this website as long as due credit is given to author Jocelyn Soriano and the website itakeoffthemask.com)