When I first stumbled upon "The Truth Shall Not Set Mother Goose Free" I was enraptured by its length because a piece in Teen Ink is almost never two pages long. I skipped over it, reading some other things but ultimately, I came back to Amy's story. Going through it, I found myself hanging on to every word as she described her classroom's Mother Reader ritual and how her mom was to participate in it. However, the abuse within Amy's family came up halfway through and it seemed to dig a curveball within my gut because all the stars the mother seemed to hold in her eyes seemed to dissipate as Amy's classmate Mariah asked, "'Is it true that your husband hits you and that he had to go to the hospital because you burned him?'"

Yet the worst of it had not come to pass.

It wasn't until I read the line "My dad wasn't there, but his memory was. It was in the cracked halls and the hallways where he stabbed me when I was 12" that I took a sharp intake of breath because the abuse seemed to get worse as I read each line. I read with wide eyes as Amy found herself finding solace at "the bottom of a Jack Daniel's bottle."

Though Amy has some bad habits, I sincerely hope the author is able to find herself one day in the midst of it all.