A Child Called It By Dave Pelzer

A Child Called "It" is a creative non-fiction memoir of the American author David James "Dave" Pelzer. The story takes place in Daly City, San Francisco, California between the late 1960s and early 1970s. Pelzer wrote several autobiographical and self-help books and is best known for his 1995 memoir of childhood abuse titled A Child Called "It". His book is written in the author's viewpoint and it is about the severe abuse that he suffered as a child. The book shows the readers the many emotional and physical methods that his mother had abused him when he was at the age of 4 to the age of 12, which was when he was sent into foster care. In his book, Pelzer describes how his mom had starved him, forced him to drink ammonia, stabbed him in the

He recollects the times when his mother loved him and treated him with equality in the household. That was until things start to take a completely different route and the psychological and physical abuse began. Not only that, his mother treated her other children with kindness and provided lavish meals for them then forced Little Dave to clean up their mess, not even allowing him their scraps. Withholding food, making him chant "I am a bad boy" like a mantra, and smashing his face into a mirror was just the beginning of torturing her son. Even his siblings were not allowed to acknowledge him in the household and called him an “it”, hence the namesake of the book, and his father did absolutely nothing to defend his son. After he was removed from his parents' care, he hints that his mother had moved on to his brother, who also wrote a book about his abuse. Pelzer's objectives for his story is to show that it is possible for a parent to become abusive and that it is possible for a child, or person, to triumph and survive. He had published many self-help books after that, and the majority of his books mainly discourse about being

The Lost Boy: A Foster Child's Search for the Love of a Family is his second book, published in 1997, and it covered Pelzer's teenage years. The third book in his series is titled A Man Named Dave: A Story of Triumph and Forgiveness and it is about Pelzer's experiences as an adult and how he had come to forgive his father for not stepping up and interfering when the abuse was taking place. The book is a memoir written as a novel in the first-person narrative. The first chapter starts with shocking details then the author takes the readers back to the present and then again to a flash-back. He resorts to the use of direct, yet graphic, form of language that has a huge element of realism. That is attributed to the author being a war veteran, where he joined the U.S. Air Force in 1979 by the age of 18 and served in the Gulf War, and he believes that there is nothing poetic nor romantic about addiction, abuse, and what happened to him. There is a fusion of text and dialogue, but he only includes what are necessary for the story to give it depth and make it flow. The truly astonishing aspect of this story is how Little Dave did not give up hope due to the years of accumulated physical and mental abuse and how he chose to survive. He learns that he has to stand up for himself and also rely on the kindness of strangers. He figures out