Reviews with content warning for Homophobia - The Book of Essie

The story and characters are engaging, but they felt lifeless and cliche. Some characters, such as the Pastor and Essie’s mom, had personas which never fully developed. I never understood their motives, or those of Liberty Bell.

I like where the story ended up, but it was expected. There are too many gimmicky tropes plopped into the storyline, it is forced into with a predictable evolution. Too many “unseen” activities made my suspension of disbelief difficult.

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lozlox's review against another edition

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inspiring reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

I enjoyed reading this book, Essie is a great main character. Roarke was likeable, as was his dynamic with Essie, but early-Roarke seemed to disappear as the book progressed.
I gave it just short of 4 stars because it lacked the depth I’d expected. I feel this is, in part, a result of the pacing speeding up big time just past the halfway point. Some might prefer it like that, but I found it strange for there to be such a light touch on such heavy topics.

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seawarrior's review against another edition

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3.0

This was a surprisingly engaging novel that I read in the course of a night. I couldn't bear to part with the characters until I knew if they'd snare justice for what was being done to Essie. Since I read it so quickly I initially didn't notice many of the novel's flaws, but after thinking about it more I am frustrated with some of the ways the characters were portrayed.

First of all, it was courageous and necessary for Weir to write a novel that multiply exposes the ways in which evangelical families inflict harm on their children. The parents in this story are not relentlessly evil, they have some level of affection for their children. Yet they place them into situations where their mental and physical health is compromised, and look the other way or deny that the harm is occurring, even when the evidence is staring them in the face. I found this to be a fairly realistic portrayal of some of the relentlessly evangelical families I have known personally or heard about from the children that escaped.

However, I thought it was negligent to not depict how Essie, Liberty or Roarke distanced themselves from their family's bigoted beliefs, especially since Essie in particular didn't seem to have much access to information that was not monitored by her parents. Disowning these poisonous beliefs taught as moral truths is a process that takes time and is necessary to living the rest of one's life without demeaning others. I just didn't believe that these characters could have emerged from this process so quickly, and from simply knowing a few people who questioned them. The bigoted evangelical young people I knew in school were relentless with their belief system, even when they asserted that they didn't really hate the individual people in groups they disrespected. If they ever unwound these thoughts from their minds, I doubt they would be able to do so successfully in a short amount of time, and while those ideas were still being preached to them. If I'm wrong, that would be wonderful. Yet I wish Weir dug deeper into the process of unlearning bigoted ideas, since the expression of them was an important piece to understanding why the Hicks family was so dangerous not only to their children or town, but to the entire nation.

It's not my place to speak on the depiction of incestuous sexual abuse, since I'm not a survivor of it. Yet I feel that Weir's story only narrowly avoided sensationalization. Scenes where we learned who abused Essie, where her and Roarke were placed in situations where they had to pretend they weren't aware what this abuser had done, and where we learned the amount of people who were culpable for its continuation seemed intentionally written to be as dramatic as possible. Whether this offends or validates survivors of similar abuse, I can't say. The book is extremely tense and quick-paced, with much of the drama leading up to the reveal of the differing traumas the characters' parents had allowed them to suffer. I do think some of these themes could have been written with more sensitivity and depth, yet I commend Weir for telling stories about difficult subjects that many people shy away from acknowledging.

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