Book Review: Without Saying Goodbye by Laura Jarratt

A deeply emotional and complex thriller from Laura Jarratt that explores motherhood, love and the desperate need to protect it... at any cost. Read on for Doreen Sheridan's review!

Two very different women take the drastic decision to leave their entire lives behind without a word to the people they know. Our first main character is the kind of tragic, brave heroine readers are used to cheering for. Twenty-two-year-old Lily takes the courageous step of packing up four year-old Sammy and running away from her abusive husband, despite the crippling insecurity he’s instilled in her. She has no idea what she’s doing, as a person or as a mother. She only knows that her husband will kill her if she doesn’t get away, and that she couldn’t possibly leave their innocent child in his sadistic clutches.

Middle-aged Cerys has a more unusual story. A dark depression has taken over her life, causing her to drive away one night from her husband and mostly grown children. At a remote location, she sets her car on fire then waits for death to claim her:

She’d considered staying in the car and going up with it, rather than sitting here watching, but she was a coward and afraid of the pain. Afraid she might not stay the course, might get out–screaming and horribly burned–to die in agony on this cold hillside. No, that wasn’t for her. Far better to end it like this and let the cold take her down slowly. A farmer’s daughter like her knew that was a kinder death. She just hoped it would drown the blackness out as she went under. She didn’t want that to follow her down. It had kept her in its clutches long enough now.

When she wakes the next morning to find that the weather has unexpectedly warmed and that she isn’t dead after all, she begins a meandering journey that leads her to the seaside area where Lily has reached the end of her own rope. Instinctively helping with Sammy, Cerys provides a comforting, nurturing presence to a Lily whose own mother was only ever neglectful at best. The two women strike up a quick bond, with Cerys finding her depression abruptly held at bay, if not altogether lifted, by her renewed sense of purpose in helping out a young woman who’s clearly overwhelmed and in need of her advice and support. 

A curious mixture of desperation and neediness causes the women to not only agree to stick with one another for the short term but to avoid talking about pasts that are clearly uncomfortable subjects for them both. Cerys, who is both more experienced and fighting an existential crisis instead of one of basic survival, has more time to reflect on whether she’s doing the right thing:

She did wonder sometimes, because she wasn’t stupid, whether she was wrong to entirely trust Lily. She knew nothing about her and that was a risk. These things happened–people were conned and taken in. And the people that happened to believed they couldn’t possibly be mistaken about the person they had placed so much faith in, just like she felt about Lily.

 

So was she wrong? She felt right down deep inside that she wasn’t. That Lily was a lost, damaged child who wouldn’t have been that way had she had her as a mother. But she was no fool, and damaged people could be dangerous. And she wasn’t stupid enough to think that damage could just be loved away.

The women help each other stay incognito in a remote Welsh town, even as the police and press are made aware of their individual disappearances. Cerys’ family is wracked with grief, but Lily’s husband is filled with a far more violent emotion. Will the women’s efforts to keep Lily and Sammy safe from him ultimately end in success, or will a night of blood and terror put an end to more than one person’s dreams, if not a life entire?

Without Saying Goodbye is a very thoughtful look at the different stages of a woman’s life. It emphasizes the importance of having positive maternal figures to help nurture and care for not only the next generations but the ones that came before. As a celebration of women’s friendships and bonds, this novel encourages women to reach out and ask for help, urging them to not feel ashamed of being unhappy, much less imperfect. 

This book also does something fairly rare in fiction, never mind the crime genre, by examining the hormonal effects of menopause on mental health. Cerys isn’t just sad about being an empty nester: she’s also trying to cope with a perfect storm of physical and emotional fluctuations. Her journey of self-discovery, long deferred, also takes into account her own failures to create an identity for herself outside of being a mother. 

Laura Jarratt is never preachy as she writes even-handedly about our very human protagonists coming to terms with their own flaws in order to rise stronger as individuals, mothers and friends in this sensitive, yet highly absorbing thriller. This level of reflection raises this novel over its peers, making it worth a hundred volumes on self-help or mothering, in addition to being a very entertaining story.

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