From the Heartland of Kentucky; Mary Daugherty's review of The Unbreakable Child featured in Wednesdays Women of The NEWS-ENTERPRISE newspaper, Elizabethtown, KY. Jan 5 2010
If you or someone you know is a victim of child abuse go to http://www.childabuse.com/ Mary Daugherty is also the branch head for the Hardin County Librarian North BranchThe Unbreakable Child
Kim Richardson
By MARY DAUGHERTY"I want to begin this year with a review of a book that comes with a message from a Kentucky author and has touched me more than any book I've read in the past year. Grim yet ultimately inspiring, "The Unbreakable Child" is a harrowing biography that catalogs years of institutional abuse that took place in the Saint Thomas-Saint Vincent Orphan Asylum, a Catholic orphanage in Anchorage, Ky.
After many years of neglect by their drug-addicted mother, Richardson and her three older sisters were abandoned to the care of the Sisters of Charity. Detailing daily regimens of physical and mental abuse at the hands of the sisters, this chilling memoir explains what happened at the orphanage and how the Roman Catholic Church kept it a secret, allowing the mistreatment to continue for decades.
Describing her life through adulthood and the decision to finally expose the injustices after more than 30 years, this courageous tale chronicles the lawsuit initiated by 45 survivors, the two years of litigation and the first successful prosecution of a lawsuit against Roman Catholic sisters in the United States for decades of abuse in an orphanage.
Richardson's memoir started as an outline for her attorney, William McMurry, but it slowly took on a life of its own. It became a story she had to tell. To get through the lawsuit, which Richardson and her attorney initiated in 2004, she began her through the past and began confronting nightmares that would take her childhood pain out into the open. She had hid her abuses from her family and friends but soon would bare her pain to the world.
In an interview with Richardson, she said the journey has been a painful learning experience, but a light has managed to shine through for her. ..." Mary Daugherty, THE ENTERPRISE-NEWS
