🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕
Wow. This is an exceptional read – one that is truly unique and deeply, profoundly, unsettling.
Strange Sally Diamond is indeed strange, but she is also heartbreakingly vulnerable, a character written with such authenticity that once you get to know her, her voice will begin to haunt you. One of two first-person POV narrators of this story, Sally’s world is dark, and it will take some time, (paced perfectly by this master storyteller) for the reader to get inside her head. But once enough of her backstory is revealed, there is no going back. Yes, Sally is strange, but she is also incredibly compelling, both smart and ‘deficient’, and her story is absolutely impossible to put down.
Without giving the plot away (no spoilers here), you will need to read it to learn more. Including, tantalizingly, the identity of the second first-person narrator.
Suffice it to say that this is a book about unspeakable evil. And trauma. And the resilience of the human spirit. But most of all, it is a story about lost innocence, and the longing for love, and acceptance, that will persist – in even the most hideous of circumstances.
Highly recommended, (for all but sensitive readers), this book is guaranteed to chill you to the core. Leaving you strangely (and ironically) wanting more – these characters, beginning with Sally, so beautifully captured and deeply entrenched, it will take some time to free them.
A great big thank you to Netgalley, the author and the publisher for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.
