Twenty years ago, Holly Smith didn't know how drastically her life would change when she joined her county's sexual-abuse team. What she first considered a temporary job became a gut-wrenching,
but ultimately satisfying quest that touched hundreds of children's lives.
Fire of the Five Hearts is Smith's unflinching account of her work with the victims of incest, a crime that affects one in five children. In stark, elegant prose, Smith immerses us in the
grueling details of her young patients' lives. The accounts are punctuated with a range of emotions: disgust, shock, anger, guilt, joy at victory tempered by sadness over innocence lost.
Smith relates with utter honesty the toll this work takes on her as a therapist and as a person. She expresses the rage, as well as the strange compassion she feels toward incest offenders; the
surrealism of reading sexually explicit, stomach-turning reports every day; the raw, painful process of prying open the soul of a child; and the uncompromising passion that has sustained her in
this work for two decades. In the face of this horrifying crime, Fire of the Five Hearts breaks through the secrecy and silence to find hope for both victims and healers.
