Island Justice - Softcover

All my life I have been fascinated by islands. I spent most of my childhood summers on an island off the coast of Connecticut which gave me the setting for this book. What happens to people when you put a circle of water around them? What kind of community do they form? What rules do they adopt? How do they administer justice? Much has been written about battered wives and abused children. When we hear those terms, we think about physical beatings and sexual assaults. I have long wished to write a book about an equally damaging and yet, far subtler, form of abuse. In the case of Anna and Al Craven in ISLAND JUSTICE, I am writing about emotional abuse, about what it feels like to be stalked by your own husband. Al criticizes Anna's every move, follows her everywhere, opens her mail and destroys her possessions. When Anna threatens to turn away from him, he crawls into bed with their teenage daughter. "If you won't take care of me, then she'll have to," he says because above all, he deserves to be comforted. It is a particularly insidious form of blackmail. If his wife does not do what he orders, then he will hurt their daughter to keep Anna in line. All the while, Al is telling Anna that he loves her. His greatest proof of that "love?" He doesn't hit her the way other men on the island would do. I believe that far more women in this country suffer from this kind of subtly destructive emotional abuse than from physical assault. Sometimes it flips over into the battering we read about in newspapers. More often, if because of her financial or emotional state, a women cannot make her escape from a marriage like this, she suffers a long, slow death of the spirit. At the same time, I was eager to write a modern love story, one that does not ignore the difficulty of committing to another human being in this age of soaring divorce rates and women with demanding careers. The reader who watches Maggie Hammond's growing love fo! r Sam and her struggle to trust him cannot help but remember the story of Anna Craven and the daily despair of her life with Al. In the end, both women triumph in their own way. Maggie learns to love and trust a man and Anna learns to love and trust herself.

-Elizabeth Winthrop

"A fabulous book...the handling of the whole domestic abuse issue was done beautifully...ISLAND JUSTICE is one of the best books I've read in a long time."

Christiane Northrup, M.D., F.A.C.O.G. author, WOMEN'S BODIES, WOMEN'S WISDOM editor, Health Wisdom for Women