AMITY AND SORROW.

 FORENAME(S) CATEGORY.....

AMITY AND SORROW by PEGGY RILEY.

SOURCE: A Christmas present.

One father: two daughters: fifty wives.

They're waiting for Salvation. Pray it never comes.

In the wake of a suspicious fire, Amaranth gathers her barely-teenage daughters, Amity and Sorrow, and flees from the rural fundamentalist cult run by her husband. 

After four days on the run, Amaranth crashes the car, leaving the family stranded at a gas station, innocent and stranded.

Rescue comes in the unlikely form of a downtrodden farmer, a man who offers sanctuary. But while Amity blooms in this new world, free from her father's tyranny, Sorrow will do anything to get back home. And Amaranth herself needs to know what happened to the other wives, the other children.

Amity and Sorrow is a story about God, sex, and farming;  an unforgettable journey into the horrors a true believer can inflict upon his family. It is the gripping story of these remarkable women, the beauty and suffering of their former lives and their heartbreaking, hopeful, doubtful future. 
..... Inner Front cover

FIRST SENTENCE: Two sisters sit , side by side, in the backseat of an old car.

MEMORABLE MOMENT {Page 127}: They could stuff sausages at four years of age but they couldn't write their names down, so the devil couldn't trick them into signing his book.

MY THOUGHTS: I don't know about not judging a book by its cover but I certainly wish I hadn't been so influenced by this particular book cover which was the thing (followed by several positive blog reviews) that initially attracted me.

A novel about what happens when a mother, Amaranth, (one of no less than 50 wives) and her two daughters (Amity, 12, and Sorrow, 14) escape a polygamous cult. I was hoping for a good, possibly insightful, read into a lifestyle that fascinates me. Instead of which I got this dull read which was anything but.

With a story line that jumped from the present day which saw the women living on a rural farm to the past which told of their lives as one of a multitude of women/siblings living on what can only be described as a compound. Thank goodness the chapter headings differentiated between the two making a confusing read slightly less so.

Combined with the fact that as the story progresses Sorrow's story becomes one of less depth and one of what I felt was mere sensationalism and the author's awful tendency to pose a conundrum (how did Amaranth come to be caught up in the cult? Just who did set fire to the 'temple'?) only to defer the 'answer' until it is a distant memory that I had long since lost any real interest in or her even worse habit of beginning to explore an issue without ever running with it I ultimately found Amity and Sorrow a frustrating read with little to recommend it.

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