I have to say – this is the most supportive statement I have read that perfectly described this Appellant. “A sadistic, remorseless person who now happens to be old.” I find no comfort when reading “Guilty on all accounts.” This woman who Children Services once described as:
4-7-68: One of the very best homes.
20-10-69: Excellent Home.
14-5-70: Continue to provide excellent care & service for all their children.
6-4-71: W.O. feels this is an Excellent F.H. Children receiving lost of love & care.
This sadistic, remorseless person was granted care of forty-six children in a ten year span. And she was found guilty on five counts. What about the other forty-one. The walking wounded.
This Book Will Wreck You. In the Best Way. A Review of The World on Either Side by Diane Terrana
Some books you finish and set down gently. Like you’re afraid to disturb what just happened inside you. Diane Terrana’s debut is one of those books.
I’ll admit I’m not a neutral reviewer here. Diane was my creative writing instructor, and watching a teacher you admire put their own work into the world… it means something. This one I read with my whole heart.
Valentine is sixteen, gutted by grief, and done with the world. Her boyfriend is gone and she’s gone with him. Just a body in a bed. Her mother does the only thing she can think of: she books two tickets to Thailand and hopes the world is big enough to pull her daughter back into it.
It is. Barely.
What Terrana does so beautifully is refuse to rush Valentine’s healing. The teenage angst here isn’t dramatic for drama’s sake. It’s raw and recognizable and real. The self-imposed invisibility, the exhausting weight of pretending to be okay, the way grief makes everything feel both unbearably loud and completely silent at the same time. Any teenager who has ever felt like they were watching life from behind glass will find themselves on these pages.
Then comes Lin. A mysterious elephant keeper with his own hidden damage. And an orphaned elephant calf that needs saving. And suddenly Valentine, who couldn’t get out of bed, is running for her life through jungle… and somehow, inexplicably, running back toward it too.
The setting is lush and transporting without being a postcard. The adventure is genuinely breathless. The romance is earned rather than convenient. And Terrana’s prose moves the way grief actually does. Not in a straight line, but in unexpected spirals, with grace arriving sideways when you least expect it.
I was five years old. Someone decided that mattered enough to open a file. To remove me from the only home I ever knew.
Decades later I went looking for answers. Not justice. Not confrontation. Just… the beginning. Where it started. Why.
What I found was a file that knew I existed but not how I got there. A ward of the province. Where, when, and under what circumstances: unknown. Placed in a home. Why: unknown.
Unknown. The word appears so casually. As if a child’s origins are a minor administrative gap rather than the whole story.
And then this: “I suspect there is another file.”
They suspect.
Somewhere there is a file that knows what this one won’t say. And nobody thought that mattered enough to find it.
