Marjorie Brody
Paperback: 252 pages
Publisher: Bell Bridge Books (March 1, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 161194256X
ISBN-13: 978-1611942569
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
In this thoughtful story we meet Sarah Hausman, a teen who has been traumatized by a rape and thinks she must pretend it didn't happen, and she absolutely can not tell her parents. Then we meet Judith, who is struggling to hang on to a relationship when the man she loves has gone to take care of family business.
As the story progresses, we find that Sarah has much more to hide, and the novel really lives up to the title by twisting the story every which way. Some of the people aren't who we thought they were, and incidents certainly aren't what they first appeared to be. Be ready for some surprises.
I really liked the ending, but to say what I liked would give away too many of those surprises, so I will refrain. On the other hand, I did have a bit of a hard time hanging in to read the whole story. Some of the characters were so unlikeable, and did things that didn't seem to fit, that I almost stopped reading when I was about half-way through the book. I'm glad I didn't put it down, though, because from the middle on, the story picked up, the twists were revealed and I was saying, "Ah, so that's what was going on."
That was also when I really started to enjoy how Marjorie uses craft, and I could see how she won a Pushcart nomination. This is not a novel for light reading and don't expect something that would fit in a genre. That said, I do wish there had been some early hints of what was really going on in the story. I felt like the story took me in one direction, then changed course with no turn signal. That did not bother other readers and reviewers, as comments on Amazon attest, but I found it a bit disconcerting. If hints were there and I missed them, I apologize to Marjorie.
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Marjorie is an award-winning writer and a retired psychotherapist. She will be my Wednesday's Guest this week, so I do hope you will come back and meet her. I met her at an author event a few months ago, and enjoyed getting to know her.
2 comments:
Wish I had more time for reading.
I like it when reviewers like you say what they didn't like as well as what they did.
Alicia
Thanks for the support, Alicia. Some people think we should only say the good things about a book, but I have always thought we owe it to other readers to point out the good and the not so good, if there is not so good. But then I come from the old school of journalism where a review was always part critique, analyzing the craft for strengths and weaknesses. That doesn't mean we had to find weaknesses in every book we were given to review. Some didn't have any.
That said, I do like to temper my reviews and point out that this is only one person's response to a story.
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