I sighed in dismay and horror while reading this. I had to pause at times to breathe a bit. I liked the main character a lot, and I haven't read many books from the first-person perspective of someone with PTSD. Gay's writing is eloquent and seems blunt but she describes a lot between the lines. It's what her words point to that store the horrors of what happened to Mireille; the reader is processing the extent of it all along with the characters around Mireille. A great book, if sometimes hard to read in terms of the brutality.