Some novels are gripping reads, even though you hate them all the way through. Lucinda Berry’s When She Returned has won a good amount of praise, and has over 300 reviews with an average of over 4 starts at Amazon. The mystery of the plot is gradually revealed, and the reader is forced to engage with the multiple characters. I was glad to finish it, concluding that it is really a loathsome work. 

The story is about a woman who returns to her family after disappearing for 11 years. They assumed that she had been kidnapped. It turns out that she was with a cult. Her husband after many years of bewilderment had finally remarried, and it puts him in a difficult position to have his first wife come back. Their daughter, now 16 years old, is desperate to connect with her mother who she hardly remembers. The story is narrated by the two wives and the daughter, each taken by a different actor in the unabridged audiobook. The step mother and the daughter narrate the present while the mother tells the reader about how she came to join the cult and what happened during that time.

What is so remarkable about the book is how stupid nearly every character manages to be, making all sorts of terrible decisions. The cult leader seemed to have an extraordinary power over his followers, yet there is no real explanation of what gives him this ability to stop people from using common sense. Near the end of the book, a theme of mental illness emerges, but it just reinforces a stereotype of mental illness being equatable with idiocy. This is hands down the worst book I read in 2019.

© 2019 Christian Perring

Christian Perring teaches in NYC.