Welcome to page 2!
Okay, now that you’ve clicked through, here’s my first issue. What triggers Jace to confront him is that Jace hits his own girlfriend in instinctual rage, and he sees what kind of person he’s turning into. So confronts dad, which ends badly and Jace leaves. Jace’s violence has a very different character than his father’s. Jace is emotional, losing control momentarily. It’s opportunistic. Walter Witherspoon’s violence, while very angry, is calculating. He plans his attacks. He maintains them for days.
This isn’t wrong, but it feels incomplete, particularly in comparison. Because this is told from Jace’s perspective, we get to see his thinking as he goes through this. But even with Christian, a reader can see his struggles with anger and judgement from the outside of his head. But the perspective on Judge Witherspoon’s thought processes isn’t visible. Does he just like causing pain? Is it that he does not know how to assert control in other ways? The violence I’ve had experience with always had an element of emotional loss of control, which isn’t apparent for Daddy Witherspoon. Every other character gets his or her motivations told or shown, except him, and he acts in ways I don’t understand. Which isn’t to say he’s wrong written. Just that he’s somewhat of a cipher. Perhaps a re-read would expose some more subtle things to me. Perhaps in time.
The second item which causes me some pause is the ending. Parts of the resolution seem conveniently timed as if this were an A.B.C. After School Special that needs to wrap everything up neatly by the top of the hour. Again, it’s not wrong exactly. That Jace and Christian appear to have near simultaneous epiphanies (thankfully not of the reverse your life instantly variety) at the same time is fairly pat. Perhaps one of Jace or Christian to have his realization a few chapters earlier. Something to make the end less of a simultaneous climax. The end would then be just as nuanced as the rest of the book was.
I love that Avasthi’s characters weren’t able to save their mother. I wasn’t sure whether to expect a horrible ending where one or all three of the Witherspoons incur the wrath of Judge Witherspoon in horrific fashion, or a happier ending where they get mom away in an ugly but successful fashion. I knew not to expect an epiphany from mom after which the three would ride off into the sunset leaving their abusive father behind. That would have been cheap. I read with clenched gut the last few chapters, worried for what might happen to the brothers.
I’m also thrilled that the attempted extraction of their mother from father’s clutches is not the climax of the book. That pinnacle would only have been appropriate were the point of the book about escaping abuse. It is not. It’s about the aftermath of abuse, and so it’s perfect mother’s freedom be merely a (big) step in the lives of her sons. It’s a MacGuffin. A highly tied in to the nature of the quest MacGuffin, but a MacGuffin nonetheless. This is good.
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