Reading like true crime, this work of fiction is disturbing, tragic, and gripping. Liz Nugent has managed to create a hugely compelling character and plot with Strange Sally Diamond.
Sally Diamond is indeed strange. This reader was wary of another novel using the trope of main-character-on-the-spectrum as quaint harbinger of wacky circumstances, but I quickly learned otherwise. Sally was adopted by a couple in Ireland, one a psychiatrist and one an M.D., who told her that she was found in the woods as a baby. But it's revealed that Sally, now forty-three, was actually born and kept in captivity until she was seven-years-old but has pushed down those memories. When literal-minded Sally tries to incinerate her adoptive father after he dies in old age of natural circumstances (as instructed by himself), the truth comes out.
Thus starts the dual timeline of this book. Sally's birth mother Denise was abducted by a man named Conor Geary when she was eleven-years-old. Denise was shackled inside his house for fourteen years and gives birth twice in that time. She and her seven-year-old daughter Sally were rescued after Conor Geary flees with son Peter to New Zealand. The reader learns that Peter was also birthed by Denise when she was just twelve-years-old; Conor took him away because he wanted a son, but had no use for Sally who came along later.
Peter narrates his life growing up with the cruel manipulation and isolation inflicted upon him by his father. Hearing it from Peter's point of view, one can't help but have conflicting emotions over how he turns out. In alternating chapters, adult Sally narrates her yearning for family connection yet her spurning of close contact with others. Their timelines eventually merge, and Liz Nugent adeptly depicts the sibling's struggles to be close to another person. They each try to navigate personal relationships in the aftermath of their horrific early years, sometimes hair-raisingly so. I won't lie: this was difficult to read at times.
Tragedy has rippling aftereffects. Anyone that has experienced terrible loss early in life can attest to that. Those that can wrench what recovery they can out of the wreckage, like Sally, and make something good from it are beacons of light. But as Peter points out to another character, "people are not one-hundred-percent of anything." That's an uncomfortable truth when considering Conor Geary was a monster, probably also created by a monster, who ruined many lives.
The fallout of extreme trauma and the cycle of abuse are chillingly on full display through Sally and her older brother. However, there are characters in this novel who portray the kindness of human nature and lend much-needed hope to this dark tale. Strange Sally Diamond is not your average crime fiction and I found it fascinating. 5/5.
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