When I Close My Eyes by Elizabeth Musser is told from three different viewpoints.
Henry Hughes is ex-military with a wife and young son, Jace. Jace has had heart problems most of his young life and needs open-heart surgery. Henry doesn't know how he's going to pay the medical bills. His friend mentions he could get him a "job" with another friend--a job as a hit man. Henry is so desperate, he agrees to take on such a job just this once.
He stakes out the lady he has been hired to kill on a street in Asheville, NC, takes aim as she goes to her car---but she turns her head just as he fires. Consequently, the bullet that went through her brain puts her in a coma, but doesn't kill her. He won't get his money if she doesn't die, but he can't do anything else since people come running.
Henry hadn't known anything about the woman he tried to assassinate, but when her name is splashed all over the news, he learns she is a best-selling author, Josephine Bourdillon. He begins to read her books and wonders if she really believes what she's written about faith and forgiveness. He vacillates between wanting to ask her and needing to finish the job.
In her coma, Josephine remembers her past: society parents who kept up appearances despite fighting, alcoholism, and philandering behind the scenes, a rebellious, dramatic sister, and her own struggle with depression. She felt she had to be the perfect daughter to maintain the family myth and had to carry the weight of helping her sister, who, more often than not, didn't want help.
Josephine's daughter, Paige, has rejected the faith of her parents due to the hypocrisy of her grandfather and another family friend. Paige is a junior in high school but mature for her age. Her sister, Hannah, comes home from her year of studying in France to be with the family in the wake of Josephine's shooting.
As police investigate, Paige is concerned that they'll find out about what the family calls "the awful year." Besides the death of her mother's parents that year, there are hints of a secret that Paige doesn't want to get out, a secret that might implicate someone in the family.
The "whodunnit" part of the story was handled well. Henry, of course, pulled the trigger, but once police find him, they want to know who hired him. I was sure it was one character---not the character the story points to at first---but I was wrong.
Depression is a big part of the book. Elizabeth said in a couple of interviews (here and here) that though her family was different from Josephine's, her journey with depression was very similar. She wanted to bring light to that topic and show that even people of deep faith can struggle with depression. I would caution readers who might be sensitive to this that there is a suicide attempt in the book.
Other themes are hypocrisy and God's grace.
I love that Elizabeth draws from her own experiences. She grew up in Atlanta, and she and her husband have been missionaries to France for several decades. Both Atlanta and France are featured in this book. The bulk of the story takes place in Asheville, NC. I'm not sure if Elizabeth has connections there, but that's a city I love to visit. The drive some of the characters took on I-40 through the mountains is very familiar to me.
Some of my favorite quotes:
Mama always said that the painful things of life got redeemed in her stories.
The bad stuff hadn't been able to snuff out the good stuff, or maybe it even happened because of the bad stuff.
My parents knew a lot about real, deep-down love. They knew it hurt. They knew it cost something valuable. They knew it was worth keeping.
There were just a couple of things I didn't like. One was the use of a couple of words that aren't profanity, but aren't usually found in Christian books (though one is in the KJV. However, it's not used there like it is used today). The other was bedroom scenes with Josephine and her husband, and mention of Henry's wife in a see-through nightie. Nothing explicit was shown, but it was still more than I wanted to read. None of these things needed to be in the book.
Overall, however, the story was very good and the characters were well-developed.
I listened to the audiobook nicely read by three different narrators.
No comments:
Post a Comment