Story for the Week
We’ve probably all heard the proverb: “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it’s yours. If not, it was never meant to be.”
Most of the times I’ve heard this, it’s been about romantic love. A couple breaks up and may or may not get back together. One person might be desperate to reconnect and someone tells them that the other person will come back if it was meant to be. They have to let them go and move on and hope the other person will come around.
Sounds like a rom-com in the making, truth be told.
We’re also told that love should be unconditional, but romantic love, I think, always comes with conditions. To think there are no conditions just seems unrealistic. You and your spouse or your life partner or whatever you call the person you choose to spend your life with had a whole life before you met. There’s a certain level of trust you have to have with a partner, but I don’t know anyone who can say with certainty that there’s nothing their partner could do that would make them feel differently about them.
I loved my husband Dennis, and there were still lots of times I didn’t like him very much. I think that’s true of any couple. He had a tendency to subscribe to double standards. He was way over-protective of Corinne and wouldn’t let her go anywhere without one of us for the longest time. He had a temper. There were other things, but you get the idea. He wasn’t perfect, and neither am I.
But I mentioned just a few weeks ago in When You Realize You’ve Become a Statistic…. that I only gave him two conditions before we got married. If he was ever inclined to cheat, he should just leave because we would be done, and if he ever laid a hand on me, it was over. I loved him, and I would probably still love him for a time in either of those two scenarios. You can’t just turn off your feelings after all. But our relationship staying whole was definitely conditional.
My dogs get unconditional love, and they get forgiven more easily than Dennis did. (Sorry, honey! 😜) When Oreo shreds napkins, when Isadora barks at every freakin’ noise 🙄, when Kikyo used to drag my patio furniture cushions around the yard, I get annoyed. I yell. I get very, very angry. But then they wag their tails and cuddle up because they can’t tell me why they did what they did. They can’t “use their words.” So I forgive pretty easily. And I don’t stop loving them.
But the first time I ever really felt unconditional love…when I heard the doctors tell me that I had just had a girl. I hadn’t even seen her yet, but I was so overwhelmed with an emotion that I had never felt, that I couldn’t describe. And I knew that I had never understood until that moment how much I could love another human being. I would do anything to make her happy, and there was nothing that would make me stop loving her.
Does she do things that annoy me? Almost every day. When she was a baby, I appreciated that she was a good sleeper. Now that she’s an 18-year-old with a job, it drives me a little bit crazy when she turns off her alarm, rolls over, and goes back to sleep. It bugs the crap out of me when I have to tell her multiple times to do something. And sometimes it’s really hard not to say “I told you so.” But do any of those make me love her any less? Nope, nope, and nope.
Corinne starts college in the fall. College is a chaotic time of forging your own path as a human, pushing the boundaries, and sometimes making questionable decisions. Parents have to trust that their kids are going to be smart and also understand that they are adults and we can’t protect them anymore.
Back to the proverb, what if we look only at the first line? If you love something, set it free. It’s a hard thing as a parent to cut those apron strings. We hope our kids will hang on just a little bit, but we have to let them go. We have to let them make their own choices. And if they make the wrong choices (like the kid in Saving Noah), we can still love them, but we have to let them be held accountable.
Loving unconditionally doesn’t mean making excuses. It just means we love them enough to let them feel the consequences of their actions….good, bad, or otherwise.
Book Review
⭐
1 Star for Saving Noah by Lucinda Berry
259 pages
Publisher: Rise Press
Publication Date: September 12, 2017
Purchased on Amazon.
Publisher’s Description
We forgive murderers, not pedophiles.
Meet Noah—an A-honor roll student, award-winning swimmer, and small-town star destined for greatness. There weren’t any signs that something was wrong until the day he confesses to molesting little girls during swim team practice. He’s sentenced to eighteen months in a juvenile sexual rehabilitation center. His mother, Adrianne, refuses to turn her back on him despite his horrific crimes, but her husband won’t allow Noah back into their home. In a series of shocking and shattering revelations, Adrianne is forced to make the hardest decision of her life. Just how far will she go to protect her son?
Saving Noah challenges everything you think you know about teenage sexual offenders. It will keep you up at night long after you’ve read the last page, questioning beliefs you once thought were true.
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Main Characters:
- Adrianne Coates – mother of Noah and Katie, nurse turned medical transcriptionist so she could work from home after her children were born
- Noah Coates – 17-year-old sex offender, just released from an 18-month rehabilitation after his conviction
- Lucas Coates – father of Noah and Katie, used to have his own accounting practice but had to change jobs once Noah confessed because he lost his clients
- Katie Coates – 7 years old, confident that Noah would never hurt her, just wants life to go back to normal
Trigger warnings: sexual assault, sexual molestation of a child, suicide
I picked up Saving Noah based on all the 4- and 5-star reviews I saw on TikTok and Facebook and Instagram and everywhere. People talking about how they sobbed at the end of the book and how amazing it was—many of them people I follow and regularly take recommendations from. Clearly, I am in the minority here, and I wish I had read the 1- and 2-star reviews, but it’s difficult to find them without spoilers. I read this book to the end, hoping for some sort of redemption, but it just kept getting worse.
Before I get into the story itself, one of my pet peeves with books that are set in a real place is when authors get details wrong. This family lived in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, one of the suburbs north of Chicago, and regularly spent time in Chicago. One of the things they talk about is going to “the Navy Pier.” It’s not the Navy Pier. It’s just Navy Pier, and it’s not a typo because it’s mentioned five times.
There’s mention of them following Katie as she skips down to the beach from the boardwalk. Navy Pier is not a boardwalk. There is a Riverwalk…along the river, but it’s not that close to Navy Pier and it takes you to the lakefront, not to the beach. North Avenue Beach is almost two miles from Navy Pier (in the opposite direction of the Riverwalk), so it’s not like you can just skip down to the beach from the boardwalk, which is what Adrianne describes. Granted, people who are not from Chicago won’t necessarily know these things, but if you’re going to pick a real major city, you have to get those details right.
By the time I got to this part of the book, I was already so far over it that it just annoyed me more.
So to the book…the story begins when Noah is being released from the rehabilitation center where he has spent the past 18 months after being convicted in juvenile court at 15 for molesting two six-year-old girls he coached in swimming. Told almost exclusively from Adrianne’s first-person point of view, the book details what I expected to be the juxtaposition of Adrianne’s unconditional love for her child and her disgust, disappointment, dismay at the the horrible things he confessed. I understand the unconditional love part. By definition, it means we love our kids no matter what. But the lack of disgust, disappointment, and dismay Adrianne feels made me dislike her more and more as I made my way through the story.
Lucas, on the other hand, seems justifiably disgusted. He objects to Adrianne’s idea that Noah can just come back home, especially with seven-year-old Katie. He suggests to Adrianne that she rent an apartment nearby for her and Noah until he goes to college the following year. He literally wants nothing to do with Noah. Katie just wants her big brother back. That’s the setup. I can’t really review the rest without spoilers.
To sum it up…this was my first Lucinda Berry novel, and it will be my last. Next time I think I want to buy a book on recommendations, I’m reading the negative reviews first.
***SPOILERS*** SPOILERS***SPOILERS***
The most egregious plot point I think in this entire book is the fact that Adrianne defends and minimizes Noah’s actions all the way through. When Noah confesses to Adrianne and Lucas, Adrianne’s first instinct is to protect her son. She meets with the parents of the two girls, telling them that she and Lucas will pay for their counseling, they can all get through this. The parents, of course, storm out and want to see Noah convicted.
Because it’s juvenile court, Noah is sent to an inpatient rehab, which is really electroshock therapy in an attempt to control his impulses. When shown pictures of little girls, he is shocked if he’s aroused. We’re told by one of Noah’s doctors that true pedophilia is rare, that very few people are truly sexually attracted to children. While Noah learns to control the impulses before he is released, the doctor is concerned that he may be one of those rare cases. When she tries to talk with Adrianne about it before she takes Noah home, Adrianne doesn’t want to discuss it.
The entire book is riddled with Adrianne making excuses for Noah, wondering why people don’t feel sorry for Noah, bemoaning the fact that Noah is a victim of being beaten up on his way to and from school, lamenting that their friends from Buffalo Grove turned against them. Seriously?! I get that she still feels love for her son, but when she claims to not believe in covering up her children’s mistakes, I just had to shake my head.
Complaining that Noah had to be registered as a sex offender for 10 years: “He’d done his time, gone to treatment, and followed through on everything they’d asked him to do, but he was still being punished. What was the point of treatment if he wasn’t going to have the opportunity to do anything they taught him there?”
After Noah is beaten up by kids from school: “All he did was touch the girls. There was no penetration or insertion of any kind…. He’d touched them, and they’d touched him. That’s all. It didn’t make it right. It was disgusting and wrong, but he didn’t physically hurt them…. He was more of a victim than those girls, but society would never see it that way. They saw it as him getting what he deserved.”
WHAT?!?! Seriously, Adrianne is delusional.
We also have the shock value of Katie understanding what Noah did without being told, but she comments that she knows that Noah would never hurt her. Plus she doesn’t mind if he touches her private parts. 😬 And it turns out we have a chapter at the end where we find out that Lucas is a pedophile as well. He was caught molesting his neighbor’s daughters in their barn as a teenager, and his parents just sent him away. So while he’s disgusted and wants nothing to do with Noah, his family has no idea that he has apparently been suppressing his own sexual deviance for years.
In the end, Noah wants to commit suicide, begs his mother to help him, and what everyone is sobbing over is that Adrianne doesn’t want Noah to die alone. She wants to spend his final moments with him, so she makes a concoction of pills to help him fall asleep and slowly stop breathing. It will be assumed that he committed suicide, since he had already tried twice, and she would take the secret to her own grave. When he tells her it’s time to turn on the playlist he made, she realizes that the compilation Noah made was for her—upbeat songs designed for her to remember the fun times they had as a family.
There’s an Epilogue one year later. Adrianne has moved back into the family home, although she and Lucas sleep in separate bedrooms and will inevitably divorce. They are only together for Katie’s sake after losing her brother. And Adrianne has started going to the pool every week to watch a little boy who reminds her of Noah, hoping that people will think she’s just there watching her own child swim. Stalker much?
This family…this is not a family I would be intrigued by…ever. And I certainly wouldn’t be sobbing over them.
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