When Sally catapults to national attention for putting her adoptive father’s body out with the trash, little does she know that this is not the first time she’s been in the headlines.
I don’t read a lot of suspense, but after seeing this book all over my Goodreads feed the last couple of years I was sufficiently intrigued. That’s a pretty startling image to start off with, one’s father in the trash!
Nugent creates a fascinating dual character study following Sally and Peter, and I enjoyed seeing their stories develop and comparing and contrasting nurture vs nature in their lives and the decisions they make. The story is a sad and dark one, but I was invested in their fates and if they’d be able to escape the results of the decisions of their fathers.
However, I did feel that after a solid first section of the book, I wish we’d had more attention paid to Sally’s narrative, as I felt we leapfrogged over her personal development and increasing social skills despite this plot-line having the shorter timeline, waving a lot of progress away through ‘she went to therapy’. The final section of the book, while interesting (and perhaps inevitable), also felt poorly executed, rushing toward the conclusion without giving us enough time to sit with what was happening, especially with the revelations about Sally’s adoptive parents.
Also, the depiction and later refutation of racist and homophobic attitudes on the part of some characters was well-intentioned on the part of the author I think, but it was definitely heavy-handed.