At Daddy's Hands: Courage Knows No Age - Overview

At Daddy's Hands: Courage Knows No Age by Jacob Paul Patchen is a riveting fictional story exploring the dark subject of child incestuous abuse that plagues families at all levels of society.  This book is a graphic journey into the life of a family where the father, Jim Handler, is a serial sexual and physical abuser to both his children and his wife. In the eyes of the public, he is a “law enforcement celebrity” detective credited for cracking a very public case involving the deaths of teens in his community. He is looked up to and respected, but Jim Handler is a Jekyll and Hyde. There is an evil side to him that transforms him into an Edward Hyde.
Ashley Handler, the mother, is a burned-out lush who seeks substance abuse to escape her fate as a battered wife. She is aware of what is happening to her children but gets pummeled every time she attempts to defend them. She hates herself, mostly due to her self-perceived cowardice in defending her children.
The oldest child is the daughter, Ally Handler, who is withdrawn and suffers from the confusion of reconciling her memories and feelings of her father between when he was a good loving dad against the times he was a pedophilic sexual abuser to her.
Tyler Handler is the middle child and only son. In High School, he demonstrated a  prowess that made him a football player. A hazing incident in the locker room wakes him up to the fact that he is following in his father’s tendencies, and that realization turns him around. He too has suffered sexual abuse from his father.
It is Jim Handler’s youngest daughter, twelve-year-old Nikki who is his current victim. She is as traumatized as the rest of her siblings from the constant abuse.  She discovers that expressing herself in a journal gives her a bit of comfort since it’s virtually impossible to talk about her situation with others. She writes stories and poetry in the journal with one of her best poems titled “At Daddy’s Hands.”
Patchen provides a background of Jim Handler’s childhood and his overbearing father. He also graphically describes the sexual depravity and brutality that each child endures from good old dad.  It’s the victims own words from their own perspective as to what a living Hell they life was with their father. Their story is a deeply psychological, gripping tale that keeps you turning the pages.  There is a monster that stirs within Jim Handler like the demon that inhabited Benjamin Horne in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. When it stirs, it is unstoppable.
Child abuse is a subject that plagues our nation and nations around the world. A subject no one wants to discuss and prays that it will never happen to their own children. Patchen captures much of the raw emotions of the sexually abused daughters and son throughout the pages of his young adult fiction book.  The scenario is disturbing because it is a very dark story illuminating some of the worst experiences a child could endure from a parent. It is a story that makes you uncomfortable because it is easy to imagine that this scenario could be happening to someone in your community, and you would never know it. But then that little voice assures and comforts us, saying, “Relax. Don’t worry. It is just fiction; it won’t happen in this home.
So how does a child escape from abuse if the abuser is not only a family member but also a well respective police officer?  Patchen explores the ramifications and consequences of serial sexual and physical abuse by a father.
For socially conscious readers predisposed to stories like this one, you will find it a true page-turner.

Reviewed by Jimmy Martin: author of "The Sam Cloustone Series."