Marrying a young preacher, raised in the pentecostal faith, a young woman sets aside her misgivings at the ceremony. She shouldn’t have, and as the years pass she finds out why he really married her, her life becomes hell.

This is one of those stories written dispassionately about events, where the reader can get so caught up they miss the passage of time. It is driven mainly by character, and that is strong enough to carry the story.

The characterisation focuses only on the bride, who tells the story in past tense, first person. While our bride remains unnamed until later chapters, she comes across clearly as a person with her own views and goals. We see her strengths, her weaknesses, and where her sometimes poor decisions come from, which makes it very easy to sympathise with her. Her husband never comes across clearly, but then in early chapters she doesn’t know him at all and in later chapters he has walled himself off from her anyway. (On a purely stylistic note, I do think I would have liked it more if she’d remained unnamed throughout. Her husband certainly did not think she was a person.)

The lack of support she encounters trying to get herself and her children out rings sadly, sadly, true, as does him getting away with it. It isn’t a satisfying story, and it doesn’t have a happy ending. For those familiar with the problem, in the real world it would only be a matter of time after the story’s end until she ends up dead.

While I prefer more final endings than the open way this ends, I can’t fault the story for it. This hits hard, and for anyone concerned with domestic violence, it answers the question of why women don’t leave very well. The other issue is that thing happen offscreen that are then refered back to. For example, we never see that she has called the police before she says that she had done so years before. It happens in one of the long time gaps between chapters.

It is a good strong story, but I am not sure which audience would read it. Literary fiction readers would probably enjoy most of the story, but romance readers won’t find much to intrigue them and suspense readers won’t find much to pull them in. On the other hand, I finished it in one read, and the ending hit hard.