Fire of the Five Hearts: A Memoir of Treating Incest Book

Twenty years ago, Holly Smith didn't know how drastically her life would change when she joined the Sexual Abuse Team in Boulder, Colorado. What she first considered a temporary job became a gut-wrenching, but ultimately satisfying quest that touched hundreds of children's lives. Fire of the Five Hearts is Smith's unflinching account of her work with victims of incest, a crime that affects one in five children. In stark, elegant prose, Smith immerses us in the grueling details of her tiny patients' lives, punctuating the accounts with her own range of emotions: disgust, shock, anger, guilt, joy at victory tempered by sadness of innocence lost. "There is nothing pretty or clean" here, and Smith relates with utter honesty the toll this work takes on her as a therapist and as a person. She expresses the rage, as well as the strange compassion she feels towards incest offenders; the surrealism of reading sexually explicit, stomach-turning reports every day; the raw, painful process of prying open the soul of a child; and the uncompromising passion that has sustained her in this work for two decades.Read More