Book Review: WHAT'S DONE IN DARKNESS by Laura McHugh

 

Title: WHAT’S DONE IN DARKNESS

Author:  Laura McHugh

Publisher:  Random House

Read: March 2021

Expected publication:  22 June 2021

My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟1/2

 

Book Description:

 

Seventeen-year-old Sarabeth has become increasingly rebellious since her parents found God and moved their family to a remote Arkansas farmstead where she's forced to wear long dresses, follow strict rules, and grow her hair down to her waist. She's all but given up on escaping the farm when a masked man appears one stifling summer morning and snatches her out of the cornfield.

A week after her abduction, she's found alongside a highway in a bloodstained dress--alive--but her family treats her like she's tainted, and there's little hope of finding her captor, who kept Sarabeth blindfolded in the dark the entire time, never uttering a word. One good thing arises from the horrific ordeal: a chance to leave the Ozarks and start a new life.

Five years later, Sarabeth is struggling to keep her past buried when investigator Nick Farrow calls. Convinced that her case is connected to the strikingly similar disappearance of another young girl, Farrow wants Sarabeth's help, and he'll do whatever it takes to get it, even if that means dragging her back to the last place she wants to go--the hills and hollers of home, to face her estranged family and all her deepest fears.

In this riveting new novel from Laura McHugh, blood ties and buried secrets draw a young woman back into the nightmare of her past to save a missing girl, unaware of what awaits her in the darkness.

What attracted me to this book:

 

There is nothing quite like a segregated religious cult to create a tense, atmospheric setting, which immediately put this book on my radar. I am happy to say that I wasn’t disappointed!

My musings:

 

WHAT’S DONE IN DARKNESS tells the story of Sarabeth, a young girl growing up in an ultra religious family in the isolated Ozark mountains. Like her peers, she is expected to grow into a good wife and mother, married off in her teens to a man of her parents’ choosing and from there on bound to house and home with the expectation of meekness and servitude to her husband. But unlike her younger sister, Sarabeth remembers a life before her parents joined the church, and she longs for the freedom she has since lost.

 

McHugh does a brilliant job in creating a sense of claustrophobia as we see the word through Sarabeth’s eyes. Her only escape from her strict parents is to offer her help in the household of a neighbouring family, where she enjoys things like TV, books or music, all banned in her own home. Sarabeht knows that soon this small reprieve will come to an end, as her parents are planning to marry her off soon. She longs to escape, but how can she get away, when her every move is being monitored by her family and the church? Sarabeht’s escape will come about through an unlikely event – one day, when stocking the family’s farm stall with produce, she is abducted and held prisoner for a week.

 

Now an adult and estranged from her family, Sarah (as she is now known as), still bears the scars of her strange childhood. When another girl disappears and police ask her to help them with their investigation, Sarah will finally have to confront her past.

 

Rolling out in two different timelines – one in the present and one from the POV of a much younger Sarabeth – the reader soon gets drawn into the sinister world of a strict religious cult where you cannot trust anyone or take anything at face value. And when Sarah returns to her childhood home, she once again puts herself in terrible danger.

 

I loved the way McHugh created tension by letting a young Sarabeth narrate the story of her everyday family life. There is an undercurrent of menace here that really got under my skin and made me feel trapped like an animal in a cage, envisaging Sarabeth’s bleak future.

 

 

Summary:

 

In summary, WHAT’S DONE IN DARKNESS is part mystery, part a character study of a young woman coming to terms with her ultra-religious upbringing and the trauma of her abduction and captivity that has ultimately freed her from the confines of her controlling family. It is dark and claustrophobic and oozes tension, and kept me in its grip whilst also touching my heart. Noone quite captures the claustrophobic atmosphere of Ozark mountain villages like Laura McHugh, and if this type of setting appeals to you, I also highly recommend reading her earlier book THE WEIGHT OF BLOOD.

 

 

 

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for the free electronic copy of this novel and for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.