Lay Your Body Down
Ratings3
Average rating2.7
15
Ratings3
Average rating2.7
A People magazine must-read of summer! "Suiter Clarke paints a devastating portrait of a cultlike institution and a town in its thrall. It’s even worse than we imagined." — New York Times Book Review A young woman returns to her rural Minnesota hometown, where a radical evangelical pastor has poisoned everyone’s minds—and may be covering up a murder. After Del Walker fled her small hometown and its cult-like church, she vowed to never return. The man she loved, Lars, left her to marry the local golden girl Eve, and their romance is now the focus of Eve’s viral blog espousing the pastor’s conservative philosophy about women and marriage. But six years later, Lars is suddenly killed, and she’s convinced it couldn’t have been an accident. When Del returns to her hometown for the funeral, she discovers the now mega-church—and the insidious, patriarchal teachings of Pastor Rick Franklin—has grown not only in size but in influence. Eve was clearly discontent in her marriage, despite the carefully constructed “Noble Wife” positivity of her blog posts, and Del knows better than anyone just how far she will go to get what she wants. Del is determined to cut through the church’s lies and corruption to find out who killed Lars—even if it means confronting the religious trauma she’s spent years trying to bury. "There are midnight-snack-style thrillers, and those that stick with you. This one's the latter." —People magazine
Reviews with the most likes.
This had a promising start! Delilah “Del” Walker is a 20-something living in the Twin Cities. Her life is a mess: she's just quit yet another dead-end retail job, her rude med student boyfriend has dumped her, and her roommate is getting ready to move out. Then she finds out on Facebook that her first boyfriend, Lars, who had broken her heart in college by cheating on her, has died in a hunting accident. He'd just contacted her for the first time in years about a week beforehand, leaving a cryptic voicemail. She wants to go to the funeral, but that means going back home to the small town she grew up in, where everyone she knows is a member the conservative, culty church she quit after that college breakup...including Lars's widow/the girl he cheated on her with, Del's former friend Eve, who has become a popular blogger espousing the submissive “Noble Wife” philosophy propagated by the church's leader. At the funeral, Lars's parents beseech Del to look further into the explanation for his death, since she has connections they don't as church outsiders. After seeing Eve in a suspicious circumstance with one of the church's pastors, she agrees. Sounds interesting, right? Small-town secrets, a cult angle, a maybe-murder mystery? But it goes pretty quickly downhill from there. Del's “investigation” makes the Scooby gang look like sophisticated sleuths, the prose is amateurish and relies on the characters delivering huge chunks of exposition through dialogue completely unrelated to the way people actually talk to each other, the obligatory romantic interest is a plot device rather than a real person, and the end...did not land, at least for me. Would not recommend this even as a beach read.
Contains spoilers
This was a hard one to rate, for me. It incorporates the super timely trad wife controversies and felt really unique in that regard. I'm a little biased because I find that phenomenon fascinating. On the other hand, I sometimes felt like it incorporated too much scene detail. Little moments about what characters were doing during conversations helped me visualize the moment but also felt unnecessary sometimes. Also, it was difficult to suspend my disbelief about those conversations at times. Like Finn immediately getting that close to Del. It was almost explainable once we knew his involvement, but not really when he says he wasn't involved from the start. It's hard to put my finger on it, but something about the writing style felt off. Overall, I did enjoy the story, though, and was left with the impression that the author was onto something special.
