The Only Girl in the World

For readers of Room and The Glass Castle, an astonishing memoir of one woman's rise above an unimaginable childhood.

Maude Julien's parents were fanatics who believed it was their sacred duty to turn her into the ultimate survivor -- raising her in isolation, tyrannizing her childhood and subjecting her to endless drills designed to "eliminate weakness." Maude learned to hold an electric fence for minutes without flinching, and to sit perfectly still in a rat-infested cellar all night long ...