Nowhere Like Home – Sara Shepard

Summary

When Lenna gets a call from her old friend Rhiannon, she is startled; Rhiannon disappeared years ago without a trace. But Lenna is even more startled to learn that Rhiannon has a son and that she lives off the grid with a group of women in a community called Halcyon. Rhiannon invites Lenna, a new mother herself, to join them. Why suffer the sleepless nights by yourself? It takes a village, after all.

Lenna decides to go and hopefully repair her relationship with Rhiannon, but as she drives into the desert and her cell service gets weaker, she becomes suspicious. Who are these women and why did Rhiannon invite her here? And that is before she learns about the community’s rules (no outside phone calls, no questions about people’s pasts) and the padlock on the gate that leads out to the main road. But Lenna has other concerns, secrets from her past she is terrified will come out. When a newcomer arrives in the community, Lenna’s worst fears are confirmed—she was brought here for a reason.

Review

I’ve SO wanted to read Sara Shepard for so long! Her debut in the genre, Nowhere Like Home, is set between a desolate desert landscape and the L.A. editorial scene. It incorporates themes of female friendships, social anxiety, and the boundaries that we put (or don’t put!) in our relationships.

The novel has a complex storyline and well-crafted characters, and it paces back and forth between flashbacks. This writing style of past and present, back to back for the entirety of the three parts the book is divided into, is not a weak point for me, but I’ve seen some reviews where this was a deal-breaker. We get to see what two of the main characters, Lenna and Rhiannon, are up to and what their journey was for them to end up in Halcyon in the form of third-person tense, which is not my favourite but again, not a deal-breaker.

Final revelations weren’t that big of a deal for me for some reason; I guess I cared more about the characters than the plot resolution itself. The exact ending was a good way to close Lenna’s and Rhi’s journey, very fitting for the book’s themes, although I found its speculative ending a bit overkill.

Click for spoilers!

Sara was Sadie, Gillian’s former roommate. Rhiannon was the one that recruited both Lenna and Sara to the commune as ordered by Coral, who was sponsoring Rhihannon’s stay. Both Lenna and Sadie were fleeing their lives because they each thought they had killed Gillian 2 years before, and both thought the other was hunting them down.

Coral was Gillian’s daughter, who she gave up for adoption in her teens, and wanted the 3 women inside Halcyon to get revenge because she knew they all had wronged her mother.

Coral’s plan was interrupted by one of the other girl’s in Halcyon and she was killed as Sadie, Lenna and Rhiannon escaped. Sadie confesses out of guilt of having pushed Gillian towards her death and Lenna “breaks up” with Rhiannon.

The book ends with Lenna and Sadie speculating about who actually killed Coral in the desert and having seen an additional person back then, wondering if Gillian really died.