My first question is, what is an arroyo? Well it's a dry creek bed in the canyons of New Mexico. There in 1981, 19 year old Michael Guzman murdered and raped one University of Mexico student and brutally stabbed dozens of times her friend. He thought he had left no witnesses but the second girl, mortally wounded and having lost most of her blood, managed somehow to crawl out of the arroyo and up on the highway to get help. She miraculously survived after hours of surgery but physically and mentally was never the same. The book covers 30 years & tells the struggles of the survivor, the trial of Guzman and how eventually Guzman was able to marry inside prison multiple women and father 4 children. I know life is not fair but the book made me furious to see what the survivor had to go through in her life and then see this murderer manipulate the system and stick the taxpayers with the bill for his children. This was an amazing and shocking true story but was marred by the amount of mistakes through it, many of them very sloppy indeed which spoilt it. I do hope she'll revise all the errors and tidy it up. It doesn't seem respectful putting it out like this.......Jody foster is spelt Jodie for starters and the dates were wrong in a couple of places stating it was April 6th 1981 when it was still the 5th. That was pretty careless, I thought. Then 1981 ended up written as 198 !!The most common mistakes were words missed out of sentences. This was highly annoying-like was/of/the/a/to...............all the way through the book.There were also quite a lot of apostrophes misused, too.Wherewithal was spelt as where-with-all, there was a random n in front of Monica's name in one place and a random fullstop put in front of Suddenly, driver was used in the same sentence twice needlessly and the same in another with him being repeated. This was a true gem-"Do theses photographs essentially depict...." as was a mention of Julie being found at 8.45pm when it was in the morning !! Later on Colene was spelt as Colleen twice which was pretty bad as well. WHY weren't these mistakes spotted ?I had to admire Colene's sheer tenacity in managing to survive the horrendous attack on her. She totally saved her own life. I know I'd have probably been happier to curl up right where I was attacked. She was amazing. It upset me how her life turned out and the crappy breaks she had in life after such a promising start and of course the perpetrator was living it large in prison. It's so horribly unjust. I was shocked he was given permission to leave the courtroom at certain junctures because hearing his confessions upset him.....amazing. I did feel for him with the rotten life he had with his delightful mother Linda though that in no way gave him leeway to commit the atrocities he did.I was never quite certain whether Julie had been raped as it didn't seem to be confirmed by what we were told. I'll need to Google Michael to see what happened to him as we weren't really told this, either.I hope both James and Colene are doing OK now.....both their lives were irrevocably affected through no fault of their own which is terribly sad.
What do You think about Escaping The Arroyo (2012)?
This was a well researched and well written book. The story is unfortunate and amazing all at once.
—arriolaaj
Fast paced - the story is tragic yet amazing one woman can have such strength
—coreylaw
If you like true crime books, I recommend this one to you.
—kala
