Captures the potential terror faced by teenagers

Not since Stephen King’s “It,” can I remember a book that so well captured the potential terror faced by teenagers about to enter the “real world.” But “It” involved an other-worldly monster drawn from King’s rich imagination. There are monsters, too, in “Copperhead Road,” but these monsters all have human faces. They interact freely with their neighbors in the community and conceal their depraved acts behind a facade of normalcy and friendliness. As his book makes crystal clear, Roger Canaff is all too familiar with this kind of all-consuming, penetrative, evil. But to his credit, his novel demonstrates that love is stronger than hate, and that friendship sometimes, not always, creates bonds stronger than those forged by trauma. This is by no means inevitable, but it is always possible. Roger Canaff teaches that this--the elevation of love over hate--must be the goal of all of us who have been affected, directly or indirectly, repeatedly or just once, by the insidious horror of childhood sexual abuse. It is far easier said than done. But it is well worth the effort.

— K. Mulhearn