Review By: Anonymous
Published: 2019
Genres: True Crime, Biography, Nonfiction
Audience: 11, 12, Adult
Goodreads Link: If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Family Secrets, and the Unbreakable Bond of Sisterhood
Content Warnings: mature audience, violence, abuse, murder
Publisher’s Summary
After more than a decade, when sisters Nikki, Sami, and Tori Knotek hear the word mom, it claws like an eagle’s talons, triggering memories that have been their secret since childhood. Until now.
For years, behind the closed doors of their farmhouse in Raymond, Washington, their sadistic mother, Shelly, subjected her girls to unimaginable abuse, degradation, torture, and psychic terrors. Through it all, Nikki, Sami, and Tori developed a defiant bond that made them far less vulnerable than Shelly imagined. Even as others were drawn into their mother’s dark and perverse web, the sisters found the strength and courage to escape an escalating nightmare that culminated in multiple murders.
Harrowing and heartrending, If You Tell is a survivor’s story of absolute evil―and the freedom and justice that Nikki, Sami, and Tori risked their lives to fight for. Sisters forever, victims no more, they found a light in the darkness that made them the resilient women they are today―loving, loved, and moving on.
Review
This is not a book for the faint of heart!! Please, if you want to read it, be prepared for your stomach to churn, to feel beyond angry, yet helpless at the same time. There is no explanation for, no credible reason for what this mother does to her own children, yet it happened. This story is an amazing tale of perserverance and love between sisters and the bond created through abuse. A true story of survival! While I don’t recommend this book for class study, I do think there is a place for it in the classroom. Many times students that are struggling with abuse and violence at home, can benefit from the validation and realization that overcoming such situations can happen. It is these students that might read this book. I also think it is a good read for teachers to better understand some of the things their students might be going through, so they are aware and can be empathetic.
