Amity & Sorrow
A Novel
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A mother and her daughters drive for days without sleep until they crash their car in rural Oklahoma. The mother, Amaranth, is desperate to get away from someone she's convinced will follow them wherever they go: her husband. The girls, Amity and Sorrow, can't imagine what the world holds outside their father's polygamous compound.
Rescue comes in the unlikely form of Bradley, a farmer grieving the loss of his wife. At first unwelcoming to these strange, prayerful women, Bradley's abiding tolerance gets the best of him, and they become a new kind of family. An unforgettable story of belief and redemption, Amity & Sorrow is about the influence of community and learning to stand on your own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Playwright Riley's debut novel is a harsh but compassionate look at nature vs. nurture through the lens of a polygamous cult. Sisters Amity and Sorrow were born and raised by their mother, Amaranth, the first of the 50 wives of a self-proclaimed prophet, the leader "preacher, father, husband" of a doomsday sect. When a confrontation with the law results in gunshots and a fire, Amaranth grabs her teenage daughters, steals a car, and drives for four days until, exhausted, she crashes near a gas station in rural Oklahoma. Sorrow, a self-righteous teenage sociopath who will destroy anyone and anything to prove she is God's chosen one, locks herself in the bathroom, where she has a miscarriage. The more compliant Amity is torn between her mother and her sister, on one side, and a world she's never experienced on the other. As they explore this new world, meeting people and making their own choices for the first time, Sorrow, with off-putting self-involvement masquerading as religious fervor, tries to destroy everyone who tries to help them. Riley's mastery keeps this unusual tale from descending into melodrama, and she makes no easy choices. Sorrow's desperate escalations lead to an unsurprising revelation that is no less powerful for its foreshadowing. A fierce and disturbing novel.
Customer Reviews
It's Okay
Note: I borrowed this book from Leah at Books Speak Volumes.
A few months ago, Amity & Sorrow by Peggy Riley made the book blogger rounds and it was a big hit. I tried to snag a copy of it on NetGalley but missed the deadline and was lucky enough to have Leah in my life, who sent me her paperback copy. Now that I’ve read it, I’m not quite sure how it got to be so popular.
Don’t get me wrong – the book is good and I didn’t dislike it. I finished it within 36 hours so it obviously has its redeeming qualities. For one, the story is interesting (a mother and her two daughters fleeing a polygamist compound is automatically intriguing). And two, the ending was unexpected. Unfortunately, the experience was a bit fuzzy. I don’t know if it was the writing style or lack of character development that kept me at an arms length from the story, but I was unable to connect with it.
Part of the problem, for me, was that I went into the book thinking it was more about the polygamist culture than it was. Because the book starts off when the women flee the compound, I should have known that their lifestyle was hindsight and not the main focus. But based on other reviews that I had read, I thought that it was going to be more in-depth.
Despite my underwhelming response to this book, I am looking forward to reading some non-fiction books written by wives that have left their polygamist cultures. Maybe that is what I was looking for without fully realizing it until the end of Amity & Sorrow. So before you decide whether to read this book, check out some other reviews!