Amity and Sorrow - Peggy Riley

'She has had to run far and fast to pull herself loose from him, to rip those stitches, but still she can feel how bound she is...'

Amity and Sorrow are sisters, and we meet them as they are on the run with their mother Amaranth, from their home which is now on fire. It was the only place the two of them have ever known; they know nothing of the outside world. Their mother has driven for four days solid in a desperate bid to escape the life she has been living, to take them away from her husband, their father, and the polygamous cult that they have grown up in. When they come to a stop, crashing the car at a gas station in the Oklahoma countryside, feeling scared and hungry, they meet Bradley, a farmer, who is sad and lonely with his own life no longer with him, and although he is initially suspicious of the three women with their unusual clothing, and though he is not overly welcoming at first, he does offer them hope and a place to stay. 

The sisters react in contrasting ways to this dramatic change in their lives; whilst Amity enjoys her newfound freedom and all the things she is discovering, Sorrow wants nothing other than to return home, to her father. 

Interspersed amongst the main narrative recounting what happened to the three women having escaped are several chapters recalling events before they left the cult, so we gradually learn how life was there, Amaranth the first of fifty wives, and we begin to understand her motives as the past slowly unfolds to us and reveals its secrets. 

This is a captivating story that drew me in; I felt compelled to read on and discover what had lain behind Amaranth's choice to be part of the cult, and to find out how the sisters would react to this whole new world that they were suddenly exposed to. The relatively short chapters of episodes in their lives encouraged me to keep reading on and not put the book down. 

I was convinced by the contrast between the sisters; it is only possible to try and imagine their lives in the cult for anyone who has never been part of such a thing, yet I believed in both their reactions - Sorrow wanting to get back there, missing all that she has known and believed in and been a key part of, and yet also Amity embracing the new aspects of life offered to her now, so much that is unknown. 

This felt to me like a highly original story with characters that I grew to understand and care about more deeply as I read on. It's also a story that made me think and ponder the different lifestyles people lead and the difficult choices people make.  I liked the structure and pace of the story and I would very much recommend this fascinating debut novel to others. 

Published by Tinder Press

Thank you to the publisher for kindly sending a copy of this novel to read and give an honest review.

You can follow the author on twitter @Peggy_Riley and visit her website here.

Peggy Riley will be stopping here on a blog tour very soon with Amity and Sorrow, so do please come back soon!

Chosen - Lesley Glaister

Dodie’s mother Stella has always been depressed and withdrawn. Then Dodie, herself now a mother to young Jake, visits her one day asking after her teenage younger brother Seth, and Stella seems uncharacteristically more lively than usual. Seth, who Dodie enjoys a good relationship with, has disappeared, and the only clue to his whereabouts is a postcard she receives from a place called the ‘Soul-Life’ centre in New York, which she later discovers is the home of a religious cult. The next time Dodie visits her mother, a tragedy has occurred. Dodie heads to New York to try and find Seth and bring him home. Dodie’s feckless partner Rod is of little support to her in this.

The clever structure of the novel means that we first read about Dodie’s present day story, drawn in and then left on a cliffhanger, and then a second narrative begins part way into the novel and tells the story of sisters Stella and Melanie, starting back in the 1970’s. They lose their mother early and Melanie, as the eldest, looks after them both, with some help from their Aunt and her partner. They meet and fall under the influence of an older dropout, and this man will change the course of both their lives forever. Finally, the novel concludes with a short section written back in the present, as the two strands come together. There are revelations in the second part of the story that had me thinking back to the first part, rethinking and reassessing everything I’d read.

This is a dark and chilling psychological thriller. It really gripped me, and I found I actually felt very tense whilst reading it, and felt the claustrophobia that the character was enduring. It was very effective at portraying the dangers of a religious cult, and how, once an individual is inside, they can be coerced, intrigued, persuaded, drugged and mislead into starting to believe what is being drummed into them day and night. It’s like a nightmare unfolding, truly terrifying, a compelling read.

Find out more about the author on the Tindal Street website.