A Roller Coaster from Start to Finish!
This book made me FEEL things.
If you've ever been a mother, or if you've ever had a mother, this book will make you feel things, too. Some of them may be heartrending, others tragic, but this book will make you feel things.
I loved this book.
With that said, let me (as I like to do) go over what I feel you need to know about this book before you purchase it. Whenever I can, I like to help readers avoid purchasing books which will provide unexpected or unwanted surprises.
First, while not what I'd call "Christian fiction," the religious aspects of this book were a bit of a smack for me. It might help to note that my to-be-read shelf (the one in my home, as I don't keep one on Goodreads) includes Witch, by Lisa Lister, 78 Degrees of Wisdom by Rachel Pollack, and The Inner Sky, by Steven Forrest.
If you're not at all interested in religious undertones in your fiction, skip this one. While it's not exactly "in your face" it was a bit much FOR ME, and I tend to be pretty diplomatic about these things. (Heavens, I even read Christian fiction from time to time. As long as I know it's Christian fiction, I'm fine with that!)
Second, it's implausible. I'm having a difficult time believing a woman was sentenced to death for the murder of an infant. I probably SHOULD be able to believe it, but I watch true crime shows and read enough true crime novels to find this difficult to swallow.
Because it is SO CONFUSING whether this novel is set in North or South Carolina, it's difficult to track down the information on death row convictions for the state in which the novel is set (but I think that would be important information. I WAS able to find the site where Pisel appears to have done her research on the female death row.
It strikes me this may have been the only research into females on death row in North Carolina the author did at all, and that astonishes me. The topic should have been more well-researched than that.
The final thing I think you need to know before committing to this book is the editing is odd. I wish, now, that I'd taken better notes with the book as I read it. (I'm terrible at this, by the way.) In one case, the author used an ENTIRELY WRONG word (one which sounded similar, but was NOT a homophone AND had an ENTIRELY different meaning).
Alright, so now you know what you NEED to know before you commit, I'd like to talk about the details, plus my feelings on this book. No worries! I don't include spoilers in my reviews.
Like the past two books I've reviewed, it was written in alternating perspectives from Sophie (the daughter), and Grace (the mother). Sophie's parts are written in third person, and Grace's in first.
It is crucial for me to mention this because there are some problems with the perspective I want to bring to light.
Specifically that Grace's portions alternate between past and present tense and her first-person perspective is in itself a potential spoiler for a novel. If you've ever read a first-person novel from the perspective of someone whose life is in peril (and Grace's is, considering she's on death row for the murder of her infant son), you'll note most of them are written in PRESENT TENSE in order to avoid alerting the reader this character survives to tell the story.
Plus, you'll note my admonition on the editing, above. This is troubling for me as this book was published by G.P. Putnam's Sons (a division of Penguin Publishing) and it seems the editing should have been SUPERIOR. Watch out for this if you're accustomed to reading better edited books!
Some story lines hang out with loose endings. In the case of this book (and I won't spoil which loose ends aren't tied up), I feel like the sub-plots are mostly unnecessary. There are three major sub plots throughout this story. None of them resolve completely. Each of them has some gaping hole which doesn't get filled by the author. The reader is left to simply drop this sub-plot entirely as though it never happened. It's frustrating.
Not only that, but the sub-plots mostly bored me. I found all but one totally uninteresting, and they had little impact on the story as a whole, other than (perhaps) to make Sophie (who is altogether unlikeable as a character) more sympathetic to the reader. At least one of these sub-plots introduces what may be her only positive traits to the reader.
Also, without giving it away, I had suspected the ending purely based on the dust jacket. If you read deeply at all, the ending is wholly predictable.
So why did I love this book so much?
It touched on issues I can understand and relate to. It made me feel things I hadn't felt in a long time. It brought emotions I had refused to feel to the surface and forced me to deal with those feelings in a healthy manner.
I loved it because it made me not only cry, but WEEP. I loved it because of the emotional tone and quality of this book, and because of how deeply it touched me. I loved this book. I did.
I think a lot of others will love this book as well, if they can tolerate the negatives and overlook those for the good in the novel. I hope you'll give it a try!
What did you think of With Love from the Inside, by Angela Pisel?
This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase a book through this page, I will receive a small commission from Amazon.
No comments:
Post a Comment