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SADIE’S SONG, by Linda Hall, Multnomah Publishers, Sisters, Ore., 2001, 301 pages, paperback, $10.99.
Sadie Thornton hears music – chilling, haunting music – that no one else hears. It comes to her on the beach one afternoon and it wakes her up at night a few days later. Even though she is a musician and is able to transcribe the music, Sadie believes it must be someone else’s song, not hers. She also believes it is connected to the sudden disappearance of two children from her coastal community.
That is the mystery author Linda Hall sets in motion in her new novel, “Sadie’s Song.” It is the fourth novel the Fredericton, New Brunswick, author has set in Maine. A New Jersey native, Hall has summered Down East since childhood. Like three of her previous books, “Katheryn’s Secret,” “Margaret’s Peace” and “Island of Refuge,” the mystery is secondary to the emotional and spiritual evolution of her characters.
In Canada, Hall is best-known for her books featuring Royal Canadian Mounted Police Cpl. Roger Sheppard. She is classified as a Christian writer because her characters attend church, make moral choices and often face spiritual crises or question their belief in God. That dilemma is central to the story Hall tells in “Sadie’s Song.”
The mystery of the children’s disappearance and where the music originates truly are secondary to Sadie’s story. She is an evangelical Christian who is a victim of domestic violence. As the abuse escalates, Sadie begins to suspect her husband, Troy, was responsible for the children’s disappearances and she feels abandoned by God.
In the book’s acknowledgments, Hall thanks the Christian women she communicated with over the Internet who shared their stories of domestic abuse with her. She also credits sociology professor Nancy Nason-Clark, author of “The Battered Wife: How Christians Confront Family Violence,” with helping Hall understand how abuse is dealt with in evangelical churches. Nason-Clark teaches in the women’s studies department at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton.
Writing in the first person, Hall takes readers to Sadie’s inner life, the place she retreats to in order to survive Troy’s verbal abuse. Sadie reads a series of historical Christ-ian novels set during the settlement of the West. She reads in snatches, sometimes while making dinner, holding the pages down with saltshakers. Sadie longs “to live in those easier, kinder days” and imagines herself an Idaho pioneer.
“… I wear a long calico dress and a bonnet. A blue one with dark ribbons. I am standing beside a wagon train, looking into the distance, a contented smile on my face. If I imagine hard enough, I can be there … . It’s a place where a man listens to me, and tells me I’m pretty just the way I am and how I don’t need to lose weight even after five babies. It’s a place where no one ever lashes out at me. A place where I am safe and sheltered.
“… A place where I have long, serious discussions with my husband and my best friends. A place where we laugh together, cry together, read the Bible together, and pray together. It is a place where I am good enough.”
Hall’s descriptions of Troy’s abuse and manipulation are chilling. To most of his fellow church members, the man is a devoted husband and father who’s lost his job in a company merger. When the couple’s troubled son Gavin is late getting home, Sadie panics and calls the police. When the officer arrives, Troy stands behind his wife rubbing her neck and shoulders as she sits shaking at the kitchen table.
“And then Ham went outside to his police car for a minute, followed by Hazel and Tom …” writes Hall. “It was just Troy and me, and his hands were around my neck, squeezing, squeezing, ‘How could you be so stupid? This is what baffles me about you. I’m totally puzzled … .’
“And then Hazel and Tom were back in the kitchen, it was just Troy’s hands rubbing my neck, massaging my shoulders and saying that I wasn’t to blame, that this sort of thing could happen to anybody and that he was as concerned about me as he was for Gavin.”
Sadie’s son eventually returns home safely, but tensions continue to mount in the days that follow as she finds solace in her music and learns that other Christian women have escaped abusive husbands. Finally, in perhaps his cruelest gesture, Troy violates Sadie’s only refuge – her music.
The suspense Hall builds into the story has little to do with the mystery described on the book jacket. The author’s ability to get inside Sadie and describe her thoughts and emotions makes this Hall’s best work. Using two very contrasting characters, the writer puts forward opposing interpretations of what Scripture states about the marriage bond and abuse. This device works well as Sadie struggles with her options.
Perhaps the best proof of Hall’s success in “Sadie’s Song” was best expressed in an e-mail posted last month on Hall’s publisher’s Web site.
” … I relived a lot of my own marriage while reading this book,” the anonymous woman wrote. “Like Sadie, I thought it was my lot in life because I made the choice to marry him … Like Sadie, I had continuous summer pains up until I left.
“They miraculously stopped after I found myself in a safe environment. I was so happy to read this book and see that I didn’t imagine some of my own feelings or experiences. There is so little help and support out there for Christian abuse victims now, I hope more people read this book and see that there is a great need.”
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