A Stolen Life By Jaycee Dugard

It was the summer of 1991 and Jaycee Dugard was facing the typical issues an eleven year old girl would. She had plans to go on a school field trip to a water park and wanted to ask her mother if she could shave her legs. However, she was never able to present the topic to her mother. On June tenth, she was kidnapped by Phillip and Nancy Garrido outside of her Lake Tahoe home, in central California, while she was walking to her bus stop. Dugard remained hopeful throughout her first days of abduction that she would return to her mother, step-father, and baby sister shortly, but the Garrido’s had a much different plan. The Garrido’s held her prisoner and stole her life. However, she was rescued in August of 2009 and felt that it was important that she shared her story to help other kidnapping, rape, and abuse victims understand that they are not alone. Her memoir, aptly titled A Stolen Life, describes in great detail the horrific, heart-wrenching events that

When Dugard arrived at the Garrido’s home, just a few hours Southwest of her own home, she was put in a run down building in their backyard. She would stay there for the remainder of her days as a prisoner. During those first years, she was locked inside that building with no water or bathroom and was completely reliant on the Garrido’s to bring her basic necessities. Unfortunately, that is not where the horrors ended. In the novel, Dugard recounts the first time she was raped, just weeks after being kidnapped. At the time, she could not imagine anything worse, but the sexual abuse continued. Garrido would go on drug led sex binges where he would force Dugard to do many repugnant actions. The only time that she was allowed some relief from the forced sex was after her two children were born. A Stolen Life recounts Dugard’s whole story exactly how she remembers it in those