Your eyes betray you
Steven van der Hoeven grows up as the youngest in a Christian family of eight children. Twice a year it's his turn for a treat week and he can choose what's on the table in the evening. His mother divides her attention as well and as badly as possible, but it continues to fight for everyone in the rowing house bursting at the seams. In the end, a friend of the family offers a solution for twelve-year-old Steven, just when he starts high school. What begins as a retreat for exclusive attention, degenerates into an unhealthy relationship. With far-reaching consequences. Your eyes betray you is an honestly written and staggering true story about a subject that has a taboo on.
From Goodreads:
RESUME:
Steven grows up in a large family in an ordinary neighborhood and where little attention is paid to him. He is on football and his trainer Ries is a good friend of the family. He offers to bother about Steven who is just going to high school. What the parents do not know is what lies behind this offer: sexual abuse. What Steven has to experience and that in exchange to watch movies he is still too young for, attention, cola and candy. In the beginning of the sexual abuse Steven is curious about everything that Ries tells him and does with him and does not look for it much. It is then also quite innocent. However, when the sexual games of Ries take more extreme forms, Steven gets scared of him. Mentally and physically he suffers from this. He does not tell anything at home on the one hand afraid of the reaction of his parents and on the other hand he does not want to lose Ries's exclusive attention. He is completely alone. He can and does not share his secret with anyone. In the meantime, Ries just keeps on coming to the floor with his parents and the fine, understanding football coach is hanging out. The parents still have nothing to watch. Steven almost goes under, because he no longer understands Ries's behavior and actions. Shame and an inferiority play a big role and do not make his life easy. It's going bad at school and he often plays truant. At home he can no longer bear the sweet words of his mother. Steven changes into another, unmanageable, inward-looking boy. His parents do not understand it. His emotional life disappears into the background with all its consequences. He is not able to build up a full-fledged relationship with a woman at a later age.
Eventually his secret comes out and he is forced to tell it to his parents and he gets help and understanding from all sides.
The book contains an extensive afterword in which can be read how it is with Steven. What he had to do to get where he is now. It was fighting or fleeing.
MY PERSONAL OPINION:
While reading, I could not keep it dry so gripping, sad and sometimes frightening. That a boy of this age comes into contact with such sexual experiences is almost impossible to imagine, but unfortunately turns out to be the reality.
I have a lot of respect for the way Steven has dealt with this. How strong he has been as a child, but also how lonely. What his (social) world looked like.
It is a realistic story, well constructed, written smoothly in a pleasant writing style.
