Book review: Doubting Stephen

Posted on Wednesday, October 23, 2013 in Book Reviews | 0 comments

by Anne Borrowdale

★★★★★

What if everything you’ve built your life on turns out to be a lie? From marriage relations to religious convictions, Borrowdale takes her readers on a journey from happy naivete to open-eyed acceptance of the truth.

This book’s draw, for me, was its extremes of character development—whether the nauseatingly religious or the flaky crystal healers—while managing to present everyone as normal, next-door-neighbor types. Thirty pages into the book, I was already convinced of its reality, as if Borrowdale were writing about her own family (I hope she wasn’t).

This is supposed to be a murder mystery, but so intrigued was I with the personal development of the innocent, struggling to survive the shakeup of their beliefs, that I lost interest in uncovering the guilty, until the latter chapters when the twisting plot line drew me in so tightly that I couldn’t put the book down. It really is a great story. I was a bit cranky about one minor aspect of the ending, but to present details here would be a spoiler, so I settled for complaining to the author.

Just kidding. Sort of. Either way, this is one book you definitely want to read. But beware: truth trumps in the end, for better or worse.