Our narrator is a repulsive man. A self obsessed pornagrapher and drug user, he is driving on a lonely stretch of wilderness road with an open bottle of bourbon in his lap. As he reaches for it the bottle it slips through his fingers and falls on to the floor of the passenger side. Instinctively reaching for it, he takes his eyes off the road for only a second; veers too far and the car crashes through the guard rail, plummeting to the bottom of the ravine and exploding into flames.  He wakes up in the ER and learns that he is horrifically burned and the only thing that saved him was the fact that after the explosion the car slid just a bit further ending up in a creek, where the water put out the worst of the flames before rescue workers arrived to get him out of the car. With burns covering most of his face and body he is transformed and is now repulsive on the outside as well as the inside.

Soon he is  transferred to  the burn unit where he goes through excruciating treatments and surgeries in order to give him back some of his mobility and function. The unceasing pain and agony that he goes through is balanced with endless hours of  vague twilight sleep that opiates often give which are filled with strange dreams. His one goal is to get well enough to be able to kill himself.  It is the one thing that keeps him alive -the will to die.

And then one day Marianne Engle appears in his room. She seems to know things about him that would be impossible for a stranger like her to know.  She is a patient in the Psych ward at the same hospital, but how she ended up in his room no one can say. But he is intrigued and soon Marianne begins visiting him regularly and tells him stories-stories about another time and place where she insists they were lovers.

Davidson has created an extraordinary story about the timelessness of love and its redemptive power which can transform lives if we let it. Although we never learn the narrator’s name, we see his transformation unfold and much like the debridement he undergoes physically he also sheds his emotional scar tissue even as he resists the pull of love to heal and make him whole. Marianne is a force of nature and she always  keeps the reader guessing- is she for real or does she really belong in a psych ward!  Davidson’s writing is both deft and honest. He does not sugar coat the cost and hard work that redemption and transformation require, and yet there is almost a playfulness with which he balances these hardships by using Marianne’s Shevardnadze like stories to keep the plot of the story moving forward and slowly revealing the layers of mystery surrounding her. This was a very satisfying and enjoyable read!

Brenda’s Rating **** (4 out of 5 Stars)

Recommend this book to: Marian, Lauren, Sharon and Keith

Book Study Worthy? Yes

Read in ebook format.