"There," says Alice Hayward to Reverend Stephen Drew, just after her baptism, and just before going home to the husband who will kill her that evening and then shoot himself. Drew, tortured by the cryptic finality of that short utterance, feels his faith in God slipping away and is saved from despair only by a meeting with Heather Laurent, the author of wildly successful, inspirational books about . . . angels.
Heather survived a childhood that culminated in her own parents' murder-suicide, so she identifies deeply with Alice’s daughter, Katie, offering herself as a mentor to the girl and a shoulder for Stephen – who flees the pulpit to be with Heather and see if there is anything to be salvaged from the spiritual wreckage around him.
But then the State's Attorney begins to suspect that Alice's husband may not have killed himself. . .and finds out that Alice had secrets only her minister knew.
Secrets of Eden is both a haunting literary thriller and a deeply evocative testament to the inner complexities that mark all of our lives. Once again Chris Bohjalian has given us a riveting page-turner in which nothing is precisely what it seems. As one character remarks, “Believe no one. Trust no one. Assume all of our stories are suspect.”
My thoughts
Secrets of Eden was not what I expected. It is written from each character’s point of view regarding the murder-suicide of a troubled couple after the woman was baptized that same morning. So we have the minister, who question’s his faith, the couple’s teenage daughter, the state’s attorney who believes it was not a suicide and this author and experts on angels who has a month affair with the minister after the fact and also indentifies with the teenager since her parents had died in a similar circumstance many years earlier.
The novel draws me in as we learn more about the minister and his thoughts, but lost me when it came to Heather (the angel expert) and I wondered why she was a part of this novel. There was a lot of information regarding the personal lives of each of these individuals that I drifted many times trying to get the end. Although, there was a surprise ending (to me, anyway), I don’t think it was worth the time getting to it.
Note: This book was borrowed from my local library.
0 comments:
Post a Comment