Never Forsaken

Never Forsaken
by Cindy Scott
Non-Fiction – Biography
299 Pages
Reviewed on 02/15/2021
Reviewed by Vincent Dublado for Readers’ Favorite

Marion Ghent spent the last fifteen years of her life writing her World War II memoirs. Sadly, she never saw her book published as she passed away. Thankfully, her daughter Cindy Scott made the promise of finishing what her mother had started, and the result is Never Forsaken: A Young Woman’s Gripping Account of Faith, Courage, and Survival Before, During, and After World War II. War experiences are harrowing, even more so when you are the youngest of eleven children growing up on a serene plantation in Mindanao that you are forced to abandon at the outbreak of the Japanese invasion. Marion has to hide among the Moros with a feeling of uneasiness, as the Moros (ancestors of an Islamist terrorist group) fought with both foreigners and fellow Filipinos. Ghent is eventually taken by the Japanese Imperial Army to a prison camp where she witnesses the inhumane conditions of other prisoners of war.

It is heartbreaking and at the same time encouraging to read Marion’s account and those of her family and immediate friends. In such a period of turmoil, many often give up hope, but Marion found something to cling to that gave her the reason to live—her family and the grace of God. Cindy Scott’s narrative gets to the core of her mother’s story. She inhabits her mother’s memories so that the book truly feels like Marion was able to finish and publish her work. Never Forsaken is another documentation of the horrors of war, but it has an evergreen relevance that makes you recognize the indefatigable human spirit that rises in the time of adversity. In this real-life story, it comes in the form of a young woman named Marion Ghent.