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Goodison has penned an interesting thriller jam-packed with treachery, recriminations, guilt, and guile. All her major characters have locked something away in their pasts that they don’t want to revisit but must if there’s to be any hope of saving the children they love.
Walking to school, an eight-year-old girl is hit by an automobile. The attending doctor tells her parents that she’s basically brain dead with no chance of recovery. After a period of time the mother wants to pull the plug. The father doesn’t. The couple divorces. Nine months later the woman has another daughter—fathered by a different man. Five years go by and the second daughter begins to experience fainting spells. An attending psychiatrist using hypnosis discovers that the second child is revealing information as if it were coming from the first child—who is still alive in a vegetative state. If you think that’s weird, even stranger things are in store.
The author does a good job of delineating her characters and making it clear that while some are basically good and others creepily bad, none are perfect and none are without their share of secrets. A tendency toward repetitiveness does not materially diminish the intricate way she peels back each layer of the onion to expose secrets that must come to light for the sake of the girls. Some readers might find it difficult to adhere to a willing suspension of disbelief relating to the psychiatrist’s diagnosis and proposed cure, but if they’re sufficiently compelled to see how this latticework of lies plays out, they’ll be rewarded in the end.