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Gill, Joel Christian – Fights: One Boy’s Triumph Over Violence

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Fights: One Boy’s Triumph Over Violence

Hey, he put a huge spoiler right in the title! I kid, mostly because this book gets pretty grim at times and thought I should try to get something a little lighthearted into this review. If you’re triggered by bullying, physical and/or sexual abuse or just awful human beings, consider yourself warned. This is his story, and the man is graphically open about everything that happened to him growing up. Things start off with him driving his son home from school, when a realization hits him: he has never had to fight and might not even know how to defend himself. This brings him back to his own awful time growing up, and it starts off with that most implacable type of bully: somebody who just wants to hit you because they’re bigger than you. There’s no reasoning with them, and you can usually only put off the beating for so long. And he was SO young when all this started! From there we see more of his home life (and the way he depicts the sexual abuse, how inevitable it seemed to him at the time, is utterly heartbreaking), and then move on to his second set of bullies. Or his second notable set of bullies; they do seem to be a constant problem. Oh, and let’s not forget the racial slurs. This set of bullies is when he learned to start fighting back, but that was immediately derailed by the news of the death of his father. This naturally upends his life, and leads into a problem that he only really understood in hindsight: his own transformation into a bully. I don’t want to get into the rest of the book, because it’s an incredible story that you should really read for yourselves, but he does gradually realize the pit he’s fallen into with the bullying, and the journey back is far from easy. There’s sabotage along the way, but there are also friends, and he even falls in love. If this is coming across as cheesy, that’s purely due to my failures trying to describe it. It’s riveting, and it’s impossible not to root for him the whole time, even when it’s only hoping for him to come through. There are lots of blurbs from some amazing artists on this book, and for good reason. Check it out! $20