From the very first page, Into the Arms throws you straight into the storm. This isn’t a story told, it’s lived. We follow Rei, a girl clawing through her youth with an aching heart and sharp eyes, struggling to understand love, shame, and survival in a world that often turns its back on innocence. Author Angelica Lamb’s novel is part memoir, part emotional reckoning, a raw and lyrical unraveling of trauma, told through flashbacks, poetic fragments, and brutal honesty. We’re led from Rei’s early days at a cold Catholic boarding school through a series of shattering, formative experiences into womanhood. What holds it all together is a quiet inner light, dimmed but never out. The writing itself is jagged, unfiltered, emotionally dense, and it works.

Angelica Lamb doesn’t give you time to warm up or settle in. You’re tossed into Rei’s mind. Her pain, her longing, her awkward, tender, and often horrifying moments, every one of them slices through you. Some scenes, especially with Rei’s father or the grotesque acts at boarding school, made me physically squirm. And yet I couldn’t stop. The writing is wild. Sentences swerve, thoughts bleed into each other, and punctuation comes second to rhythm. It reads more like memory than fiction, fragmented, dreamlike, vivid. Lamb’s greatest gift might be how she makes trauma feel both intensely personal and alarmingly universal. I saw my younger self in Rei more times than I care to admit.

There’s barely a plot in the traditional sense, but the emotional thread? Oh, it’s there. It pulls you under and doesn’t let go. I loved the way Lamb lets Rei be a contradiction. Sweet and angry. Lost and wise. Scarred and still somehow soft. Her journey is filled with abuse, abandonment, awakening, and through it all, this persistent, haunting whisper: “You are love.”

If you’ve ever felt silenced, if you’ve questioned your worth, or carried shame that didn’t belong to you, then Into the Arms might just feel like someone seeing you. I’d recommend it to women healing from emotional or sexual trauma, to lovers of poetic memoir, and to those who find power in pain. It’s a hard read. A beautiful one. And one I won’t forget.

Pages: 416 | ISBN : 1036966186