The Marks Left On Her at times is an incredibly heavy read and I found myself putting it down as the events that the unnamed female narrator experienced were breaking my heart.

The book is fictionalised but based on the real experiences of the author who explores through an unnamed narrator several parts of her life. There is the young girl who struggles to understand her place in the world as she deals with her Hong Kongese and white Jewish heritage, growing up in Hong Kong. There is the teenage girl, who wants to be attractive and popular falling into drinking, smoking, taking drugs and who ends up being a sexual assault victim. Then there is the survivor and adult women, who has to come to terms with the fact she was raped, deal with the breakdown of several terrible relationships and struggles to find her feet after those events of her teenage years.

The book narrative started out a little simplistic, I think to reflect the youth and innocence of the girl at the beginning. However the short chapters and short sentences style grew on me across the book and definitely developed. I also think this style helped me to digest some of the heavy experiences the women dealt with. What I did really like were the lists and poems that were interwoven between the main chapters as these really spoke to me about some of the pain and experiences the women felt.

I felt like this book really took me on a journey which thankfully ended on a note of positivity and felt like there was a healing quality to the writing of the book.

It was almost certainly a powerful book for Di Lebowitz to have written and to have shared her experiences with such honesty and reflection. There were just so many complexities to this book, her focus on her mixed-raced identity and being othered, struggling with the demons of mental health and self-harm, the breakdowns of mother-daughter relationships and absent fathers and dealing with the violence of sexual assault. There is a lot going on in this book for certain but it is all well-handled, thoughtful and it honestly broke my heart a little bit.

It's not a light read, so I think those picking it up definitely need to be in the right frame of mind, but definitely a worthwhile read. Thanks to @onwepress for the proof.

TW: self-harm, suicide, abortion, abuse, rape, absentee parents.