This book is a wonderful read for anybody. Despite the tragedy, adversity and emotional struggle, it radiates compassion and warmth in all directions. It is inspiring and makes one cherish existing family bonds.
The literary style is mostly straightforward, eloquent and expressive. This is interspersed with paragraphs in italics in which the author relates what she wants to say to her daughter at the time with affective poetic elegance. It belies the author’s comment that she doesn’t know grammar; her writing is articulate and deeply moving.
The author shows a capacity for deep self-reflection and expressing her emotions, hence the text is infused with her personality.
What is striking is that even from emotional depths and despair, and a moment of resentment, she doesn’t look backwards with anger at the world, dwelling in victimhood and attribution. It is known that a mindset of blame and anger, regardless of any actual culpability, greatly exacerbates and prolongs post-traumatic suffering, physical and mental.
Instead, her focus remains forward, day by day, and to the future. Indeed, she and her husband had no thought of claiming financial compensation until they realised this was important for their daughter’s future. Rosie’s attitude adds to this, constantly striving to improve, propelling herself forward, with negative emotions only resulting from understandable frustration rather than an entrenched victim-role.
Testament to their attitude is that the author and her husband met with the other party in the accident with an open mind and with compassion and warmth.
This is what makes the book so uplifting.