Author: Lucinda Berry
# of Pages: 221 (ebook)
Genre: Adult, Contemporary, Mystery
Rating: ★★★★☆
Synopsis: Meet Noah—an A-honor roll student, award-winning swimmer, and small-town star destined for greatness. There weren’t any signs that something was wrong until the day he confesses to molesting little girls during swim team practice. He’s sentenced to eighteen months in a juvenile sexual rehabilitation center. His mother, Adrianne, refuses to turn her back on him despite his horrific crimes, but her husband won’t allow Noah back into their home. In a series of shocking and shattering revelations, Adrianne is forced to make the hardest decision of her life. Just how far will she go to protect her son?
Review: Four stars for feelings, three stars for everything else.
Anyone who categorizes this as a true horror + thriller as the top Goodreads genres indicate must consider true crime documentaries to be in those categories as well. This book starts AFTER the sexual assault has occurred, so at most it would be consider a mystery for its page-turning qualities on what will happen next to Noah.
It's hard to not compare Noah's (fictional) situation with the real-life, high profile Brock Turner case that happened a couple of years prior to the publication of this book. Both Noah and Brock were popular, high achieving athletes before committing their respective sex crimes. With the unwavering love a mother has for her child, Adrianne lives in the delusion that her son deserves better because of how much of a "good boy" he's been in the rest of his life, making her a very unreliable narrator for this story.
Of course, Adrianne delusion immediately repulsed me - these were VERY similar arguments that result in Brock Turner getting a sentence lighter than the crime committed. I couldn't believe this story was going to be told from such an unpopular perspective, yet this lesser-told POV is the aspect of the book that made it so gripping.
Not that her POV is without faults - Adrianne is TELLING the reader the story rather than letting the reader experience it alongside her. This means a lot of time skipping (less bothersome) AND another POV weaved in every few chapters (first person POV switching, more bothersome).
I'm conflicted over the book's message. Pedophilia is not "fixable", so Noah's resolution for this sends a controversial message to other pedophiles who have truly good intentions. This story also raises a lot of questions about pedophilia that don't get answer in this book, e.g. what are the possible cause of Noah's pedophilia (environment, genetics, etc.), that would have been important and helpful to the reader when presenting a very challenging, pedophilic-sympathetic argument.
There's also a lot of focus on how being a sex offender has ruined Noah's life, but very little focus on what happened to the victims of being molested and how they were affected. This makes it MUCH easier for the reader to feel sorry for Noah when he receives backlash from society.
Without presenting the (more popular) other side of the story of the impact on the victims, it is more difficult for readers to holistically determine for themselves how warranted society's disgust toward pedophiles is. While some people may agree that the "punishments" Noah's peers inflict upon him are too extreme, Adrianne's extremely biased perspective on Noah deserving a second chance at a normal life is a hard pill to swallow when readers know that victims can carry this trauma with them for the rest of their life to no fault of their own.
That being said, Adrianne's (delusional) love for her son is admirable and is a love that many would hope to have when experiencing (hopefully lesser) faults of our own from our mothers. Their story and relationship is heartbreaking genuinely had me in tears at the end. This aspect of the book is what earned the fourth star in my rating rather than the surprise twist at the end of the book that fell flat for me.
This was a very fast read, and not just because it's a short book. I had problems putting this book down because I wanted to know what was going to happen to Noah. I couldn't shake the feeling that the shoe was going to drop and had to keep reading. Even though I was disappointed by the twisting and resolution and wasn't a big fan of the simplistic writing style (Berry could have added more nuance to her characters), I would still recommend this book if you can handle an unpopular perspective on a difficult topic.
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