Starred Review for Publishers Weekly

No one with even a marginal interest in true crime writing should miss this page-turner, by turns shocking and almost unbearably sad. In 1979, in an underworld-style hit, a gunman shot John Busby, a policeman in Cape Cod; a fluke saved John's life, but he was permanently disfigured and disabled, and the family placed under 24-hour protection. Eventually the family went into hiding in Tennessee, but arguably their “disappearance” takes place long before they move—as John and his daughter, Cylin, alternately narrate, readers can see how the shooting erased the family's sense of themselves. John is consumed with anger at the police's refusal to pursue the likeliest suspects (“and [I] planned to stay angry until I got back at the bastards who did this to me”); Cylin, then nine, is baffled as she and her two older brothers attract unwelcome attention (“Everyone thinks your dad is going to die,” a cousin tells her. “But you're lucky—you don't have to go to school”) and are later forsaken as classmates' parents deem friendship with them too risky. Where John's chapters provide the grim facts, it is Cylin's authentically childlike perspective that, in revealing the cost to her innocence, renders the tragic experience most searingly. Ages 14-up. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(Sept.)

ALA Booklist

Before August 31, 1979, nine-year-old Cylin's biggest worry was avoiding her grumpy neighbor. Then her family's life changed forever when her father, a Cape Cod policeman, was shot on his drive to work. Horribly injured, with most of his lower jaw blown away, John Busby somehow managed to stop his car and run for help. Although John was convinced he knew his attacker's identity, the investigation mysteriously stalled, and the Busby family was given 24-hour protection during the long experimental effort to reconstruct John's face. Eventually the family went into hiding, starting over in another state. In alternating chapters, John and Cylin Busby tell the story of John's ordeal and the devastating impact on his family. John's laconic, just-the-facts-ma'am style underscores the horror he was enduring, while Cylin's perspective drives home the fear and emotional misery the family suffered. The appalling physical injuries may deter the squeamish, but this riveting story will stay with readers, particularly its message that John's anger and desire for revenge were the hardest wounds to heal.

Horn Book

Policeman John Busby narrates being blasted in the face with a shotgun and the harrowing treatments that save him. Daughter Cylin describes the subsequent security measures that change her life into a kind of prison. Father and daughter have riveting stories to tell in this gritty memoir, but the book's tag-team format ultimately shortchanges each of them.

Kirkus Reviews

In 1979, John Busby, a Falmouth, Mass., cop was shot in the face while driving to work. This alternating father-daughter memoir provides a graphic account of the event and its yearlong aftermath—both directly attributable to a corruption-riddled municipal government. Readers should know that the book depicts Busby's shooting, injuries and reconstructive surgeries in unrelenting detail. Until the family was secretly relocated, Cylin, nine, and her brothers struggled to manage an intolerable burden of fear, even under 24-hour police protection. The account ends before readers learn how (or if) they made it to adulthood in one piece. Beyond recounting a fascinating, if lurid, tabloid story, neither author offers any analysis or reflection that would allow readers to place the events in a larger context. At once competitive, stubborn and aggressive, Busby's personality seems to have both prompted the shooting and helped him survive it. The implications of governmental corruption go unnoted, including the official response to the shooting itself—protecting the family with taxpayer-funded firearms and police surveillance, rather than institutional reform. (Memoir. 14 & up)

School Library Journal

Gr 9 Up-On August 31, 1979, tough cop John Busby was shot at close range while driving to work on Cape Cod. Bleeding profusely with the lower half of his face blown off, he realized that somebody wanted him dead, and identified a brazen local bully as the culprit, an arsonist with whose family Busby had clashed on the job. John and his daughter, Cylin, who was nine at the time of the shooting, recount the year that followed in alternating chapters, incorporating candid commentary and sometimes-disturbing detail about a crime that never resulted in arrests. With the entire Busby family under 24-hour police protection, John began the reconstructive surgeries that would stretch for years, while Cylin and her two brothers tried to cope with guards accompanying them to school and the resulting social isolation. John Busby is frank about the corruption in the local police department that let his attacker intimidate anyone he chose, and bluntly describes his frustration and need for revenge in the months following the attack. Cylin speaks with a voice of innocence shattered as she struggles to comprehend what happened to her family and why her friends have abandoned her. When the town balked at the continuing expense of providing personal protection and the constant fear brought the family to the breaking point, the Busbys went into hiding, seeking a return to some semblance of normalcy. The page-turner pace is frequently interrupted by awkwardly placed flashbacks to moments in John's police work, but, ultimately, this is a story of survival and triumph. Joyce Adams Burner, Hillcrest Library, Prairie Village, KS

Voice of Youth Advocates

Cylin Busby was nine in 1979, the year her police officer father, John, was shot in their Massachusetts resort town. He spent several months in a Boston hospital, where he was stabilized, and began a long course of reconstructive surgeries on his face. Cylin and her two brothers stayed with relatives in Boston for awhile, not privy to the extent of their father's injuries and seeing their mother only occasionally, during the rare times when she left their father's bedside for short breaks. Eventually the family returned home, living with round-the-clock guards, police escorts to school, a guard dog, and a barricade surrounding their house. City politics interfered with the investigation of John's shooting, and realizing that their miserable lifestyle was not going to change, the family relocated to the South, carefully covering their tracks. The book alternates between the perspectives of Cylin and John, providing great insight into the difficulties they faced individually and as a family. John is angry, frustrated with his physical condition, and concerned for his family's safety. Cylin becomes a social outcast at school and is frightened for her father. Confined to their house and limited to the company of each other, the family members become irritable. Throughout Cylin's mother tends to her father, takes care of the household duties, and most amazingly, finishes nursing school, graduating at the top of her class. This true-crime story manages to be suspenseful and reflective at the same time, and it will draw both leisure and reluctant readers.-Jenny Ingram.