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Just a Boy, Richard McCann
Ebury Press
Reviewed by Lindsay Wright (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

Some people live desolate lives. Richard McCann's 28-year-old mother, Wilma McCann, was the Yorkshire Ripper's fifth victim.

Just a Boy begins in 1975 with the author and his two sisters huddled together in their cold council flat in England – then venturing out in the morning snow to find their mother, who hadn't returned from a night on the town. From that moment on, their lives were destroyed.

They narrowly missed stumbling on her body – but end up living with their brutish, estranged father – and exist in quiet despair through physical beatings and mental abuse, then continue the pattern on in their own adult lives. They're murder victims for life.

The author does a stint in the army, followed by a jail sentence for drug offences, before he decides to pull his life together. The random savageness of their early lives is left behind as he and sister Sonia pool their mutual love to rebuild their lives.

McCann's version is by turns chilling, heartbreaking and inspirational.