Helen finds the video and, traumatised by the sight of her husband raping her daughter, whacks him with a golf club when he returns home. Her relationship with her husband wasn’t great, but she never thought that he would be in an pedophile group or that he would spike his daughter’s drink with a date rape drug and video his sick games so he could show his online friends. The revelation also shocks her to near breaking point. So, of course, Helen, the mother, feels enormously guilty. Phoebe couldn’t have become her father’s play thing if her mother had been around all those nights. This absence from the daughter’s life in pursuit of a career is a topic that many women and, I hope, men will relate to. She has delved into the guilt, the shame and the horror felt by the victim, a fifteen year old girl raped many times by her father, and the girl’s mother, a high powered lawyer who spent more time at work than she did with her daughter. Are they really going to ask that fifteen year old to stand up in public and identify her father as her rapist? Yes, they are, and there is nothing the women can do to stop it.įarris has taken the heart-wrenching topic of incestuous sexual abuse and approached it bravely. In just a few scenes we are shown that, despite our laws, there is still precious little justice for rape victims today. Truly, if we didn’t find it disturbing, there’d be something wrong with us. This is an excellent work of literary fiction, well written, moving and thought provoking, in fact, at times, downright disturbing.

Ripple by Tui Allen