A review by melissa_who_reads
The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World by Sarah Weinman

5.0

Fascinating read. She intertwines the stories of Sally Horner, who was kidnapped and held for nearly 2 years, traveling the country as the daughter of a man who called himself her father - while raping her repeatedly; with the story of Nabokov's writing of his novel Lolita. She explores how Sally's ordeal gave Nabokov a structure for his novel - he had been playing around with the idea of the novel, but Sally's ordeal gave him the pieces to put it together. He even throws in a direct reference to her.

Sally's story is ultimately heartbreaking: she survives her kidnapping, only to die in a car crash at age 15. She never got a chance to grow up; she had to live and go to school in 1950's Camden, New Jersey, a town that knew all about her ordeal and blamed her for what had happened to her. After living to see her tormentor put in jail, bravely willing to testify against him at trial - he avoided it by pleading guilty, to have her die so young in such a way that was completely unrelated to her ordeal. Painful.