Ladder Valley by Donna Miller Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing Review by Keith Foster $21.95 ISBN 978-1-988783-24-6 Based on her life story, Donna Miller’s Ladder Valley reads more like a psychological thriller than a memoir. Her first-person narrative smashes through raw emotions like a chainsaw shredding flesh. This is Miller’s fourth book in a series called Help Me; I’m Naked. Examining mother-daughter relationships, her hard-hitting look at domestic violence shows how abuse affects three generations of women as it trickles down from mother to daughter to granddaughter. To protect their privacy, Miller changes her name and those of her children. She becomes Korel, and her children are Angie, Sonya, Sapphire, and Kennalyn. They’re living near Big River, an isolated area on the edge of Saskatchewan’s boreal forest, in 1979-1980. Due to a curse by her great-grandmother, all of Korel’s relationships, and those of her mother, turn out badly. Listening to her mother describe being raped at age six, Korel finds herself “slipping into a pit, an ugly black abyss of compassion juxtaposed with anger” and contempt, creating a ghetto in her soul. An only child whose father molested her, Korel fled an unhappy marriage with her four daughters, then…

A Family of Our Own by Donna Miller Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing Review by Kris Brandhagen $21.95 978-1927756-08-9 A Family of Our Own, by Donna Miller, book two of her Help Me, I’m Naked series of books, proves an excellent read on its own, honest and earnest, independently of the first and third books. Miller opens the story with a prologue, in a way that abruptly smacks of childlike innocence. “My daddy would never do something like that for real. The arguing and fighting were plays they put on for my benefit, though my young mind couldn’t understand why they would want to perform such horrible plays. Sometimes I found the scenes so scary, so crimson, I would go hide in my closet.” This sense of disbelief sets the stage for the body of the book, which is a memoir (with changed names) of the tragedies that she and the women and children in her family have endured, spanning the years 1966 through 1974, when the main character, Korel, is in grade seven to the age of twenty-three. The severity of Korel’s own situation is hinted at through her sense of awe at finding herself in the midst…

Know Thyself: Help Me, I’m Naked, Book Three by Donna Miller Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing Review by Justin Dittrick $21.95 ISBN 9 781927 756348 In Donna Miller’s Know Thyself: Help Me, I’m Naked, Book Three, readers will find an engrossing, heartfelt, and honest memoir. Miller is a natural story-teller and memoirist, her memory of events startlingly clear, the prose crystalline, spare, and even. The events it depicts are relentlessly tragic, yet affirm the gift of life in faith, grace, and hope. The sense of harmony at this memoir’s depth is achieved through the rich development of its many strong female characters, who repeatedly demonstrate ingenuity, self-sacrifice, and resilience in the most trying circumstances imaginable. In one passage, the narrator admits that she does not grasp the difference between knowledge and understanding, with knowledge being defined as the possession of information, and understanding being defined as the possession of meaning in that information. This memoir’s great achievement is that it maintains just the right distance from its well-developed characters and detailing of events, a kind of sympathetic distance for the great costs attributable to free will, allowing the reader to grasp meaning in spite of the complexity of motivations…

Black Fury, Help Me, I’m Naked: Book One by Donna Miller Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing Review by Catherine Fuchs $19.95 ISBN 9781894431798 This riveting book takes the reader to knee level to peer into the keyhole of the marriage of the author’s parents. Outwardly they were a good looking and glamorous couple who both tried to hide the abuse that was always smouldering beneath the veneer of their image as “a happy couple.” Their young daughter, Saskatchewan author Donna Miller, gives us a first hand account of what it was like to grow up watching her father physically abuse her mother. Her father, Joe, was a very socially intelligent yet insecure man who was extremely jealous and controlling of her of mother. He was also a textbook abuser, who would explain away his behavior with his unenlightened remarks such as, “ I admit I’ve slapped her, but only when she deserved it.” Worse, he would mock her bruises by saying to her, “You look so beautiful in blue.” His actions did always seem to come back to haunt him though, like the time he slapped her so hard she fell into a coma and lost the twins boys…