With the best of intentions strangled by the sins of their fathers, all the love in the world can’t save her parents from damning her future before it begins. She is brilliant and beautiful and certain to set the world afire, but the backwoods lawlessness bleeding into her urban-esque Northern California town shows little mercy toward the big dreams of little girls. When a playground confession sets her world on end, she is subjected to the care of an absentee father whose weakness for alcohol and obsession with image do less to prepare her for the dangers of the outside world than they do to protect her from the ones inside the walls of their home on Argyle Road. As her eighteenth birthday nears, the dysfunctional framework of obligated love that enabled her survival for seventeen years places her in the crosshairs of a serial predator operating in the open with the protections of his employer, black belt, and friends in local law enforcement. Upon her abuser’s imprisonment, her own life sentence begins with vilification by her loved ones and shame by her peers as her reality is fractured by the guilt of her complicity in another’s crimes and the self-loathing from her unwitting denial of a victimhood everyone refuses to see. With a goal of survival and desperation cloaked as ambition, she bulldozes her way through early college graduation, doctorate studies in biophysics, and law school, fighting injustice in both the lab and the courtroom while leaving a trail of abusive lovers, broken engagements, booze, pills, and a soul-crushing visit to the psych ward. Through moments of breathtaking revelation about the truths that lie behind silent eyes, No Wonder Land provides a boldly intimate glimpse into the power of love as a weapon and the vein of ignorance that weakens society when we fail to recognize that sexual abuse is something we all have in common as opposed to a hashtag that sets its victims apart.
