Dave Pelzer is a New York Times best-selling author who chronicles his abusive childhood in a trilogy of memoirs. A Child Called It focuses on Pelzer’s young life until he is handed over to foster care. In this memoir Pelzer depicts himself as a sensitive yet resilient young person who is determined to survive seemingly insurmountable emotional and physical manipulation. He is characterized by his will to survive and the small but clever ways he usurps his mother’s control. Pelzer’s struggle is one of endurance. He learns to overcome his challenges moment to moment, and he is eventually led to a safe environment with the help of his school administrators. Pelzer’s story illustrates the helplessness and innocence of child abuse victims and explores how domestic power struggles affect these children’s early lives. The other books in Pelzer’s trilogy of memoirs are The Lost Boy: A Foster Child’s Search for the Love of a Family (1997) and A Man Named Dave: A Story of Triumph and Forgiveness (2000).

Catherine Roerva begins the book as a washed-up, angry single mother who takes her frustrations out on her children, namely author Dave Pelzer. However, as the book transitions into its second chapter, Pelzer portrays his mother in a different light. He reveals a note of forgiveness in his writing when he describes his mother Catherine’s early efforts to provide warm family gatherings and outings when her children were little. Pelzer reveals her desire for a loving family, which hints at a history of abuse in his mother’s own childhood that may have contributed to her increasingly abusive behavior.

However, this nostalgic view of Catherine is short-lived. She is decidedly the villain of the text. The rest of the narrative outlines how Catherine uses physical, psychological, and verbal abuse to control Dave and, to a lesser degree, the rest of the Pelzer family when they fall short of her high and often irrational expectations. For instance, Pelzer describes several instances when Catherine instructs her sons to find something that she has lost, though they know this object is nowhere to be found and possibly does not exist. This inventive mistreatment only escalates as the book continues. From locking Dave in the bathroom with toxic fumes to forcing him to lay in cold water for hours to insisting that Dave eat his infant brother’s excrement, Catherine becomes less humanized as the book goes on, lacking a sense of empathy or remorse for her actions. This lack of empathy eventually drives a wedge between her and her husband Stephen, who leaves her at the end of the book.