Anne Borrowdale

A thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying read. Covers so many themes: religion (Christianity), alternative medicine (crystal therapy), sex (hetero- and homosexuality), a mysterious death, the way humans construct ideas of truth - and the intersection of all these. The death plays a secondary role to the characters and their relationships to each other (although the plot around the death gets pretty suspenseful near the end!) - and they reflect a little (or a lot) of all of us who have grown up in religious or health fundamentalisms. The writing is excellent and the story is totally engaging as we peer under the surface of faith and family. The ambiguous title is great. Although all the ideas I've listed above may seem heavy the story is actually easy to read but wonderfully provocative. Highly recommend it!… (plus d'informations)

What if everything you’ve built your life on turns out to be a lie? From marriage relations to religious convictions, Borrowdale takes her readers on a journey from happy naivete to open-eyed acceptance of the truth.

This book’s draw, for me, was its extremes of character development—whether the nauseatingly religious or the flaky crystal healers—while managing to present everyone as normal, next-door-neighbor types. Thirty pages into the book, I was already convinced of its reality, as if Borrowdale were writing about her own family (I hope she wasn’t).

This is supposed to be a murder mystery, but so intrigued was I with the personal development of the innocent, struggling to survive the shakeup of their beliefs, that I lost interest in uncovering the guilty, until the latter chapters when the twisting plot line drew me in so tightly that I couldn’t put the book down. It really is a great story. I was a bit cranky about one minor aspect of the ending, but to present details here would be a spoiler, so I settled for complaining to the author.

Just kidding. Sort of. Either way, this is one book you definitely want to read. But beware: truth trumps in the end, for better or worse.… (plus d'informations)