ENYO
When Clara’s grandparents are murdered, her life unravels. Sold to a complete stranger by a mother she barely knows, she is reduced to a nameless commodity and bartered like so many pounds of flesh. Her childhood is snuffed out. A dehumanizing cycle of abuse takes over her world. Yet Clara adapts and endures—a mind as precocious as it is nimble focused solely on survival. The day before she turns fifteen, Clara escapes her captors, and that focus shifts from survival to revenge.
Some years later, Karen McIntyre—an FBI agent turned private investigator—is enlisted to look into a series of grisly murders. As Karen digs deeper into the circumstances of the killings, a collision course between Karen and Clara becomes inescapable and sets up an encounter that will confront both women with life-altering choices.
Writing a story that tackles issues like human trafficking and the sexual exploitation of children inevitably becomes personal. It is impossible to address matters so profoundly unsettling without generating an acute sense of responsibility for those suffering through this abuse. It follows then that while ENYO—at its core—remains a thriller, it carries with it an indictment of the broken system that allows such crimes to be committed with relative impunity; a system of antiquated and biased laws that are wholly incapable of dispensing efficient justice; a system that totters and reels under the emphatically human conditions of prejudice and denial.
It's easy to feel empathy for a victim of sexual assault. It's far too easy for that emotion to mutate when we are told the victim was a prostitute. The very word carries with it a negative connotation, and our minds shift instantly to notions like "she made her choice before this happened", or even worse "she had it coming"—as if any choice ever made could justify rape. It's the kind of innate prejudice that most of us carry around to one degree or another, and they are reactions overwhelmingly rooted in ignorance. Sex trafficking of minors across the United States starts on average between the ages of 12-14. No rational human should ever imply that informed life choices are made at that age.
But as nefarious our eagerness to judge is, nothing conspires more to marginalize the victims of this broken system than our proclivity to ignore rather than face that which we find intolerable. The mere mention of child sexual abuse tends to send people scurrying for more palatable topics, and so opportunities to address the issue are passed up, and problems are left to fester while we bury our heads in greener pastures. ENYO’s world is one of fiction, but the violence it contains is all too real, and to close our eyes to it only serves to empower it.
Whether Clara emerges victorious or not is ultimately up to the reader’s point of view, but whether or not these problems will ever be solved depends in the first place on our willingness to even acknowledge their existence.
