STORY SUMMARY
Angie and David Sheehan have two young teens: Nico age 14 and Nora age 13. The children are only 10 months apart and are very close. Nico has been recently diagnosed with children's Huntington Disease.... a very rare genetic disorder. It is October and he was diagnosed over the summer. He is already displaying many of the physical and behavioral/emotional changes.
One night, their whole lives are shattered. A murder has happened and it was Nora who killed her brother Nico. She calls 911 confessing. After that, she stops talking.
Angie and David are desparate to defend their daughter so they turn to an old friend, Martine, who happens to be the mother of Angie's ex-boyfriend from high school, Julian. Julian himself is a criminal defense attorney in NYC. Martine is local and is in her early 70s thinking of retiring. But she takes on Nora's case as a favor to the family. She brings in Julian because she has not had a lot of experience with criminal defense.
Angie and Julian have to now navigate through their feelings from their shared past. Both of them carry heavy secrets for which they have no inner peace. They do share a horrible accident that happened to result in Angie's younger sister, Diana, being killed on the ski slopes of Colorado where Angie now lives with David. Her mother Livia forced her to break up with Julian....now her mother is in a memory care facility for Alzheimer's Disease but Angie remembers keeping the secret of living with Julian in NYC when both moms (Martine and Livia) think they had indeed broken off their relationship.
Angie crushed Julian when she left NYC shortly after 9/11. And that is when she had a huge secret she has never revealed to any one.
It's David who figures things out. And it's David who reveals some of the secrets that have plagued Angie....and Julian...over the years.
Will Julian be successful in doing penance for his behavior back in high school? Will Angie ever forgive her daughter for killing her son? Will they ever hear Nora talk again and explain why she pulled the trigger, not once but 3 times? Will Julian and Martine be successful in getting a plea deal for Nora and keep her out of prison for life?
How will the act of forgiveness play out in this story?
MY THOUGHTS
This was a pretty good debut but it was rather slow paced and seemed to get bogged down in spots. The bulk of the plot begins towards the middle of the book.
The characters and settings are very well developed. The description of NYC on 9/11 and shortly after were chilling as I remember that horrible day very well. It is just a brief moment in this story, but it's exceptionally well written in my opinion.
I felt relieved at the end of the story which ends with Angie and Nora together on Nora's 14th birthday. I'm glad they were together but....it left me with wanting to know more and the feelings that came out in Angie seemed much too abrupt and not fully resolved.
I was a bit disappointed at how Angie and Julian's relationship evolved after a big secret was revealed by David. It felt like that whole section could have been a bit more climactic.
The author is good at expressing all of the emotions that parents go through when a child is killed. She explains at the back of the book that this is not based on any one crime but she did research the topic of what's known as fraticide (a sibling killing another sibling). What bothered me most was that no one looked deeper into Nora's mental health. It seemed that the author was leading us one way and it ended up just falling by the wayside....it just seemed to end too abruptly.
There were some good quotes that jumped out at me and one of them is actually from a different book called Just Mercy:
"You are more than the worst thing you've ever done." (pg 278 Penitence by Kristin Koval c. 2024)
That quote is said in another spot in the book but I forgot to mark which page it was.
I also liked this quote:
"Sometimes who a person becomes is more important than who a person used to be" (pg 107)
"God goes silent on all of us. It doesn't mean He doesn't love you." (pg 137).
Overall, this book is a good look at the struggles of keeping secrets for many years, of marital issues while navigating parenthood and care of an elderly parent and parenting a child with a terminal diagnoses. It's also a good look at how the American juvenile justice system is broken. I think the author missed the mark on forgiveness though. We can only really forgive when we know the forgiveness of God. She alludes to it in her section of when Angie goes to Catholic church and "confession" but......again, it just didn't wrap up well. It is thought provoking though.
In my opinion, this book is appropriate for ages 14 and older.
On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest, I rate this an 8.
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