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Title: Amity & Sorrow
Author: Peggy Riley
Narrator: Kate Harper
Format: Unabridged
Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
Language: English
Release date: 03-28-13
Publisher: Headline Digital
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 1 votes
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary
Publisher's Summary:
Not everyone wants to be saved. Amity & Sorrow is a story about God, sex, and farming. It's The Lovely Bones meets Witness: an unforgettable journey into the horrors a true believer can inflict upon his family, and what it is like to live when the end of the world doesn't come.
In the wake of a suspicious fire, Amaranth gathers her children and flees from the cult where her children were born and raised. Now she is on the run with no one but her barely-teenage daughters, Amity and Sorrow, neither of whom have ever seen the outside world, to help her.
After four days of driving without sleep, Amaranth crashes the car, leaving the family stranded at a gas station, unsure of what to do next. Rescue comes in the unlikely form of a downtrodden farmer, a man who offers sanctuary when the women need it most.
Amity & Sorrow is the story of these remarkable women, their lives before the night they fled, and their heartbreaking, hopeful future. Over the course of a season Amaranth will test the limits of her faith, and her daughters will test the limits of her patience. While Amity blossoms in this new world, free from her father's forbidding rules and ecstatic worship, Sorrow will move heaven and earth trying to get back home... And, meanwhile, the outside world hasn't forgotten about the fire on the compound.
Critic Reviews:
"Amity & Sorrow, grace and hope, honor and innocence, bliss and deliverance - all of this from one beautifully nuanced story about the nature of family and the power of faith. I savored every word." (Lori Lansens, author of The Girls)
"A startlingly original, intelligent and beautiful first novel that I found riveting from page one. I can only wait with great anticipation for what comes next from Peggy Riley." (Michael Connelly)
Members Reviews:
A great journey
"Two sisters sit, side by side, in the backseat of an old car. Amity and Sorrow. Their hands are hot and
close together. A strip of white fabric loops between them, tying them together, wrist to wrist." And with those first lines, I'm hooked. The girls' mother, Amaranth, is running away from her polygamist husband, the Father. As in, "God, the Father." (Can you say "megalomaniac"?) Amaranth is wife #1 of fifty. That's right--fifty women with their infants and children, living off the grid on a secluded compound.
My biggest surprise, though, came when it was soon clear that the sisters weren't six and eight, which was the age I filled in for them. These sisters with the evocative Quaker-like names were twelve and sixteen--and that gave the novel a whole different spin.
Amaranth barely stops along her escape route. Not, at least, until she wrecks the car near the down-on-their-luck Bradley farm in Oklahoma. Forced to stay put for however long, Amaranth is at first an automaton, the rules from her previous life still ringing in her ears: fields are forbidden! enter no man's house! We watch as Amaranth slowly discards those rules, if only to survive. Twelve-year-old Amity, though skittish of life on the outside, has an easier time throwing off the strictures of her old life. But Sorrow's scars run deeper than anyone suspects.
Author Peggy Riley's portrayal of the shattered minds of these women is penetrating. Amaranth, quite rightly, exhibits some of the symptoms of Stockholm syndrome.
