Review: Sarah Ann Walker delivers another stunning and thought provoking read.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 10, 2014
Sadie is home alone for the weekend while her husband, Alex and son Jamie are away. She has pushed these thoughts from her mind and now is the time to finally do what she must finish. Her past contained in one box... a box that holds all the secrets she never wanted to taint her present life - the life she built with Alex and Jamie - the life she had because she they allowed her to become this new person... someone that was nothing like the one she used to be.Sadie's past is told through a series of journal entries and flashes of memories of her past that begin when she is sixteen. A journal that brings Him back to her thoughts. Their encounters, the nights he would visit, the nights she wondered where he was and eventually to a time where he was gone.She relives the brutality of an event that left her broken. There was such potency and power in the use of something as simple as a lowercase i that perfectly displayed the idea that this event had broken her completely."I begged, he laughed.He taunted, I screamed.I fought, he won.He was victorious, I died.... And now I am no more than a small broken i."The heartbreak of losing faith and trust of the one person she had let in. And with that broken trust, seeing herself differently for the first time.When Sadie meets Alex he slowly begins to gain her trust, something that is not easily done. The men that she has trusted in the past have betrayed her, so letting Alex in was not something that Sadie did with ease. But he was there. However close or far away she needed him to be. Even as much as Sadie has come to love how Alex is with her, she still wishes for Him to return to her. As Sadie attempts to face her past it forces the darkness to creep back into the perfect world she created, the world where she became the Sadie that she needed to be, the Sadie she knew she had to be for her son and her husband.I felt like I had fallen down the rabbit hole through most of this story. My mind was whirling trying to piece together her past, unable to see what was real and what wasn't. It wasn't until the very end that the pieces fit and the build up to that moment had been so filled with tension and trepidation that I wasn't sure if I wanted to know the truth, but I knew I needed it. Sadie isn't the most broken character I've stumbled upon... but she comes close. That honor belongs to one of the other characters that this author gave life to. While reading this story, Sadie's voice was so manic at times and the way she thought, spoke and just was... fit her character perfectly. I felt a little insane at times as I entered her world.Alex. He was just pure perfection. Gentle, patient and at times, when needed forceful - but never was he a man that needed to be feared. How he interacted with Sadie from the start until the last moments of the story were beautiful.I admit that I was scared to read this. Even with reassurances from the author that it was not going to break me, there is just something about the stories that she writes that you can't help but let the experience seep in and affect you. The way this story worked its way into my thoughts left me feeling emotionally raw. But not in that 'ugly cry' way that leaves you in the fetal position on the floor. In that way, where a story just crawled into my thoughts and decided to get comfortable and make itself at home.My Dear Stranger is one of those books that you don't simply read, but experience. Although there was a beautiful love story that blended in with her story, the psychological aspects ensured captivated me from the start. I am one of those readers who won't flip to the last page of a book to know how it ends, but will challenge myself to figure it out before I get to the end - this was one of those stories where that is simply just impossible. Each discovery was perfectly timed and kept just far enough out of reach to ensure that you never knew what was going to happen next. Bravo to Sarah Ann Walker for another fantastic read and thank you for not destroying me emotionally.