This book was fascinating, and horrifying. Mikey is one of several siblings growing up in a Romany family in southern England, traveling from campsite to campsite in his family trailer. He vividly describes a childhood that sounds incredibly foreign; most notably the fact that he was only allowed to attend school for a very brief period. He struggled to meet his culture's and more particularly his father's notions of masculinity; routinely very small boys are trained to box and forced into the ring against vastly larger and stronger boys who are urged to show them no restraint. Worse, he was the primary target for his father's rage and was regularly beaten. He was also publicly blasted with a power washer on a daily basis for bedwetting.
While I was perfectly engrossed by this story, by the end I found myself incredulous. Can he really have been beaten (in his telling, sometimes nearly to death) without ever coming to the attention of the authorities? In the entire twelve or thirteen year period the book covers, we read of no encounters with the police or social workers. He describes an elementary school teacher who, when offering him a change of clothes after an accident, discovers that he has been dressed in red lace panties as a punishment and is covered in welts on his legs and backside. She does nothing more than send him home, apparently.
In sum: kind of an icky reading experience.
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