“I can tell you anything. All you have to believe is the truth.” Allison’s final sentence was quite a way to end the novel. At first, I was a little weary about the book and its stories and themes because like Allison brashly admitted to the reader: “I’m a storyteller. I’ll work to make you believe me. Throw in some real stuff, change a few details, add the certainty of outrage.” That wasn’t really what I wanted to hear. As a reader, I want truth; I don’t want to be manipulated and have my sincere and honest emotions played upon and messed with by the book’s author. Ultimately, I actually ended up finding plenty of truth in Allison’s book and her life lessons both served and satisfied me well. Very often, throughout the course of my life, there have been hundreds, thousands even (we’ll say countless), of things that I thought I knew for certain, of which, of course, I turned out to be completely wrong about; it is inescapable, part of growing up and growing old, hopefully bringing with it clarity.

                       

One thing Allison knew for sure was “that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.” This is difficult realization for Allison due to her upbringing. She was brought up in an environment in which men totally and selfishly managed to eradicate/shatter any inkling of self-confidence and self-appreciation that women had. Her sister “fell in love with a boy who got a bunch of his friends to swear that the baby she was carrying could just as easily have been theirs as his…By eighteen she was no long beautiful, she was ashamed: staying up nights with her bastard son.” Something is seriously f***ed up in your neck of the woods when a typical statement from boy to girl (age 12-60+) is “You think you pretty, girl? Ha! You an’t nothing but another piece of dirt masquerading as better.” Allison became a victim of both equally as awful abuse and abuse ten times worse; she was supposed to simply “have shrunk down and died….deeply broken.” In order for Allison to discover the life lesson “if we are not beautiful….know beauty in any form” she obviously needed to learn it elsewhere.

Karate helped foster this concept. “If there was love in the world, I thought, then there was no reason I should not have it in my life.” Here she was finally able to learn how to run without fear pushing her; finally began to appreciate her body and realize her abilities and potential to do anything in life as long as she worked at it. In a lot of ways, this was a turning point that opened doors that previously had been locked shut.