Book Review: The Fifth Sister

by Laura Landgraf  (Oakland, CA Empower Press

This book will surely become required reading in many a college psychology course. The author not only survived childhood sex abuse and parental violence, but overcame it and ensured the ongoing safety of her own two children.

A page turner to the very end, this story has most of the attributes of a prize-winning novel, but is nonfiction. (I know the author personally and her present husband.) Basically, her father—a school teacher, church pastor and strong disciplinarian—was also a serial child molester, and her mother enabled him, to keep the family's public reputation unsullied. At some point in their childhood, he violated each of his five daughters (three of them adopted) besides having other extramarital affairs.

Laura divides her narrative into three sections: one from her viewpoint at age 10, the second as a teenager, and the third as an adult. In her teen-age years as a missionary kid in Ethiopia, she became fluent in the native language, capable in medical first aid, an expert horseback rider, and later a licensed airplane pilot. In contrast, her four sisters were unable to cope with the family dysfunction.

I had two questions with this book (other than the emotional turmoil I experienced while reading it): First, what could the mission organization possibly have been thinking, continuing to employ Laura's father as a Christian missionary, when (by the reply Laura's mother got from the mission's American headquarters) they must have been aware of serious family problems? Why were the father's talents as a speaker and fund-raiser so important that the family situation was ignored until the American Embassy in Ethiopia forced the parents to leave?

Secondly, I was surprised at the story's sudden ending, although I understood it better after reading on through to the last page. This is a true story, not fiction; no denouement required. Instead she asks us as readers to consider twenty-one questions to make us think seriously about our attitude toward maintaining secrecy versus blowing the whistle when childhood sex abuse occurs.