Vacchs, in his primary mystery series, does focus on child abuse and similar things. I stopped reading his a while back when things got too dark and nasty for me. YDMV.

I don't remember whether anyone has posted about Set This House in Order by Matt Ruff here. I'm about halfway through and enjoying it immensely. However I'm getting nervous that things are about to go desperately wrong for these people.

Add me to folks who can't deal with the darkness of what Vachss usually writes. And I like dark. His stuff is just too real.

Where I went to kindergarten in 1974 they were teaching some then-trendy reading technique where you learned the completly logical phonetic spellings of everything (including literature translated into such so you had third graders reading shakespeare and stuff). I don't know what it did for my reading, but I'm a lousy speller to this day (as are several other people I know who were subjected to that program). I wish I could remember the name of it... my kindergarten class picture has all the funny writing on the bulletin board behind us.

Back in my k-3 grade I got what was know as "whole language". Not phonetics at all. On the one hand, that is probably why I turned into a natural speed reader. On the other, I sometimes use it as an excuse for my inability to spell - though at my age the real reason has to be attributed to laziness.

We had phonics, which made no sense at all to me because I'd already figured out how to read as a sight reader. To get me to, for instance, learn that o-y made an "oy" sound, they couldn't give me words like "boy" or "toy" to read, because I knew both of those words without looking at the letters. They had to give me things like "foy" or "doy" to force me to actually look at the letters. (I can spell in spelling bees, but not on paper. My explanation is that I know how words look printed, so I can picture the printed word and spell it out loud, but I can't look at a hand-written word and tell if it's right. It's also easier for me to type with proper spelling if I'm using a serif font, because that's how words look to my brain.)

I'm the opposite--I'm a great speller on paper, but I absolutely suck at spelling aloud. Seriously. I got knocked out of the spelling bee in fourth grade for misspelling "jeep." Not that I didn't know perfectly well how it's spelled, but somehow what I said was "g-e-e-p." One of the great embarrassing moments of my childhood--I can still remember how loudly everyone laughed at me, the Smart Girl, for botching such a simple word! That was just a brain fart, of course, but with longer words I lose my place spelling aloud. If someone asks me to spell something for them, the only way I can be sure I'm right is to write or type it, and then read off the letters.

And I figured out how to read before starting school, but somehow I learned phonetically.

I got knocked out of the spelling bee in fourth grade for misspelling "jeep." Not that I didn't know perfectly well how it's spelled, but somehow what I said was "g-e-e-p." One of the great embarrassing moments of my childhood--I can still remember how loudly everyone laughed at me, the Smart Girl, for botching such a simple word!

"Zucchini." I meant z and said s. I felt awful. (to my classmates' credit, I don't remember getting laughed at.)

"Translate." I added an extra a after the s, and I actually could have saved myself if I hadn't continued on to the a after the l, but I only came up with that strategy after it was too late. I was in sixth grade, and I lost to a fifth grader.

I got phonics, too, and I'm a pretty good speller. Like Susan, though, if it's longer than six letters, I want to write it down to be sure. Hubby and I figure one reason we got married was so I could correct his punctuation and spelling and he could take care of tricky math concepts.

For me it was "fruit". I added an "e" to the end.

Apparently left-handed people are notoriously bad spellers, so I excuse it with genetics.