Description
In the Spider’s Web by Jerome Gold
ISBN: 978-1936364145
eBook ISBN: 978-1936364152
Price: $14.95
In the Spider’s Web, a nonfiction novel set in western Washington, centers on Caitlin Weber, a girl who, with her mother and four other children, murders her mother’s employer. The book focuses on Caitlin’s prison experience, where, assailed by guilt over what she did and confusion over how to regard her mother who masterminded the murder, she attempts to come to terms with her past. The author lives near Seattle and was Caitlin’s counselor during her first years in prison.
Reviews
“In the Spider’s Web takes a penetrating look into the lives of juvenile prisoners caught in their traumatized circumstances and struggling to maintain a semblance of normality. Jerome Gold has transformed his years of experience as a rehab counselor into a riveting narrative, offering insight into a difficult and at times harrowing world. This is a resonant and important book.”
—Leonard Chang, author of Triplines and Over the Shoulder
“In the Spider’s Web should be required reading for anyone wanting to understand the shadow world of children’s prison. Gold portrays the tragedy of these abused and neglected children’s lives with a clear-eyed recognition of their crimes, some of them horrific, along with a deep compassion for the horrors they themselves have suffered. He reveals with simplicity and honesty the day-to-day bureaucratic tensions of a counselor’s life, the physical dangers of dealing with damaged children, and the frustration and disappointment when attempts at rehabilitation fail, but also the reward of elation during the small moments of success. There is love here too, and that most eminent of human virtues: the willingness to suffer for the sake of someone else.”
—Joanna Catherine Scott, author of An Innocent in the House of the Dead and Child of the South
“There is a quiet anger that grinds through prison writing. A compulsion to tell the world what goes on inside locked wards, accompanied by the equally powerful sense that anyone willing to look may be suspect. Jerome Gold, who writes of the years he spend working in a Washington state juvenile lockup, describes these feelings with sharp economy in his spare, sometimes devastating new book, In the Spider’s Web. Stark realism is the book’s greatest strength. In the Spider’s Web reads like a diary, rat-ta-ta-tat facts interspersed with passages of sudden eloquence… Honesty…is the most valuable aspect of [Gold’s] work.”
—The Seattle Times
“Striking, deeply honest, and sensitively told, this [nonfiction] novel based in real life considers juvenile prisons and all its dramas…the stories Gold relates are often disturbing, but they are beautifully told from a sober and compassionate perspective.”
—Foreword Reviews
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