Helen Bowers, 83 has written her life story of life as an abandon child raised in an orphanage and a survivor of a physically and mentally abusive marriage. Helen, enters her dark tunnel in 1930 when she and her four brothers are abandoned by her parents and sent the State Public School for Dependent and Neglected Children in Owatonna, MN. She describes daily life in the orphanage, being sent to working homes and the abuse she received in some of those homes. Helen gets married on her 18th birthday and trades the state as her keeper for a new husband as her keeper. She writes about life in the 1940’s when she is a victim of abuse with no where to go. She nurses four severely ill children, deals with her own serious mental depression, including months of hospitalization receiving electric and insulin shock treatments. Eventually she attempts to flee from the abuse and gets invaluable help from a young lawyer, Harold LeVander, who later became a Minnesota Governor.
The difficulties of her life could not break her and helped give her the determination to work with H.H. Humphrey to bring her mother-in-law out of Romania in 1958.
After years of living in a dark tunnel where life seems hopeless, she finally receives answers to her prayers. She gains confidence and meets people who help her turn her life around. Eventually the tragedy and sorrow of the first forty years are left behind and she tells us about the next forty years. Life still holds many surprises for her. She becomes a loved woman with a rich, happy life and eventually marries her prince charming. Many who have read the book say they can’t put it down and read it in one reading session.
