Amity and Sorrow by Peggy Riley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Peggy Riley has gifted us with a superb debut novel. I read it in two greedy gulps - it would have been one if I had timed my entrance better.

Amaranth has fled with her daughters Amity and Sorrow. As the novel opens, we find the girls sitting in the back seat of a car, bound at the wrists, as their mother drives them further and further away from home.

The cloth binding their bodies together is far from the only tie that binds them. Raised in a cult, the girls are bound by the constraints of their reality - they can't read, they must unquestioningly obey unfathomable rules and they know nothing of the strange and inconceivable world through which they are being dragged. Their bodies too are bound - constrained by layers of fabric, wrapped and sewn into their millefeuille habits, heads bowed and covered, hair braided, everything shut down. Tangled and enmeshed, the three are flung outside - two unwilling, one desperate, but undeniably connected.

They have little money, no support, little comprehension of the world as it exists outside their compound, and nowhere to go. Amaranth is desperate to flee, the girls to return home.

This is not a novel for the faint hearted. How Peggy Riley crafted this novel without having personally escaped from a polygamous cult speaks volumes for her ability to create and populate a world with realism and depth. Some of the concepts raised in this piece are confronting and ugly; yet others, compellingly beautiful. Power, sacrifice, perception and truth all vie for ascendency - but so does hope.

This is one of the best novels I have read in a very long time.

Thank you NetGally and the publisher (Little, Brown and Cmpany) for the opportunity to obtain an ARC of this thought-provoking, unsettling and ultimately satisfying book. This one will remain with me for a long while.




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