Any Way Out: Your Choice by Eilidh MacTavish

Content warnings: rape, child abuse

Bold and deeply painful: a harrowing account of surviving child sexual abuse

The unnamed narrator in Any Way Out: Your Choice starts her story at just 4 1/2 years old. With a style in all capital letters and short, staccato sentences, she introduces the sexual abuse from her father on the very first page. It hurts to read, unsettling and uncomfortable and real.

We don’t linger on each scene for long however. The chapters are short, and so are the sentences; her voice is just developing. As readers, we get in and we get out of painful memory after painful memory in the unmistakable voice of this hurt little girl. Our hearts are constantly breaking for her.

Not only is she raped by her abusive father, but her mother starts to withhold her love as well, never believing her. Similarly torn apart by her husband’s drunken rampages and abuse, her soft side is withered to the bone and she loses her patience for our dear sweet narrator. Our girl feels the separation from the first moment it happens, and while there are still laughs to be had with her later, the girl knows her mother is never fully on her side.

Like her, we’re in search of any way out in every chapter. How can she break the cycle of abuse and finally start to feel something other than pain? As time goes on, opportunities arise. Ones that would save her life but be misunderstood by outsiders, unaware of what she’s gone through. This complication is a strong one.

Any Way Out: Your Choice hurts. The language is stark and direct, and the rape is described not exactly in full detail but in straightforward fact. It’s a deeply uncomfortable reading experience, it’s supposed to be, but that doesn’t make it any easier to read.

Squeamish readers beware. There are more than a few one-liners in here that’ll make you cringe and maybe even make you put the book down. It may be short, but its impact lingers far longer.

One of the primary issues here is that the young girl’s sparse narration doesn’t allow any kind of nuance in the storytelling. It pares it down to the abuse itself and the pain she feels, so it turns into the only story being told. Since it’s a story many readers unfortunately have already come to know, that escaping child abuse isn’t exactly over when the abuse stops, it results in a book that features rape on the page without much pay-off. The growth occurs, and we’re obviously happy for her, no matter how imperfect the situation might be, but we don’t really come to know her or the family around her with its extremely low word count.

Any Way Out: Your Choice is a heartbreaking read from the perspective of a sexually abused child. A painful reminder that these stories happen every day and that taking any way out is better than taking none.

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