Washoe County Library System

One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters...

“You can have everything, and still not have enough. Cassie Quinn may only be twenty-three, but she knows a few things. One: money can’t buy happiness, but it’s certainly better to have it. Two: family matters most. Three: her younger brother Billy is not a rapist. When Billy, a junior at Princeton, is arrested for assaulting his ex-girlfriend, Cassie races home to Manhattan to join forces with her big brother Nate and their parents, Lawrence...

In September 2005, Liz Seccuro received an apology letter from the man who had raped her twenty-two years earlier. The rape, which occurred when she was a freshman at the University of Virginia, was reported to the campus police, but their inquiry led nowhere. The man accused of raping her left the university soon after, and Seccuro tried to put the incident behind her, but like all survivors of trauma, the memory was never far from the surface. The...

"Alice Sebold meets Roxane Gay in Michelle Bowdler's literary debut, telling her story of rape and recovery while interrogating why one of society's most serious crimes goes largely uninvestigated The crime of rape sizzles like a lightning strike. It pounces, flattens, destroys. A person stands whole, and in a moment of unexpected violence, that life, that body is gone. Award-winning writer and public health executive Michelle Bowdler's memoir indicts...

"Renowned historian John Wood Sweet's The Sewing Girl’s Tale presents a riveting Revolutionary Era drama of the first published rape trial in American history and its long, shattering aftermath, revealing how much has changed over two centuries―and how much has not. On a moonless night in the summer of 1793 a crime was committed in the back room of a New York brothel―the kind of crime that even victims usually kept secret. Instead, seventeen-year-old...

"Leigh Collier has worked hard to build what looks like a normal life. She has a good job as a defense attorney, a daughter doing well in school, and even her divorce is relatively civilized-her life is just as unremarkable as she'd always hoped it would be. But Leigh's ordinary life masks a childhood which was far from average ... a childhood tarnished by secrets, broken by betrayal, and finally torn apart by a devastating act of violence. Then...

An Olympic hopeful recounts her journey of healing and empowerment after a rape attack in 2009, describing the media frenzy that surrounded her trial; her advocacy for fellow survivors; and the mental, spiritual, and physical exercises that enabled her recovery.

While trying to pinpoint the root of her dissatisfaction with her life, Daisy Shoemaker begins receiving misdirected emails meant for another woman and starts living vicariously through her until she discovers that their connection was not completely accidental.

Each year in the United States nearly three hundred thousand people are sexually assaulted. New practices by police, prosecutors, nurses, and rape crisis professionals are resulting in more humane and compassionate treatment of victims, and more aggressive pursuit and prosecution of persecutors. Based on seven years of in-depth interviews in Cleveland, Detroit, Memphis and other cities, Johnston presents the people behind these new approaches and...

A collection of first-person essays covers an array of topics and experiences, from child molestation to an exploration of the rape epidemic of the refugee crisis.