Before and After

This is a book that was in the right place at the right time. I went into a restaurant to have lunch. Generally when I eat by myself, I like to have a book to read, but had forgotten to bring one that day. Looking around, I spotted a book on one of the tables. When I asked the waiter if someone had left the book behind, he said it had been floating around for a few days and I was welcome to it. Well, I started Before and After at lunch, read it on the bus, took in a few chapters before bed and finished it on the way into work the next day. You could definitely say I found it riveting.

The book begins with a very normal, typical family- mother Carolyn, father Ben, brother Jacob, and sister Judith - in a small New Hampshire town. Almost immediately, the local police come to the door looking for seventeen year old Jacob, believing that he has murdered his girlfriend. What follows is how the family deals with the shocking and tragic situation, Ben wanting to protect and hide Jacob from harm, no matter his guilt; Carolyn and Judith both loving Jacob, but haunted by conscience. The chapters are alternately told from Ben's, Carolyn's, and Judith's point of view, expressing their individual shock, denial, horror and pain, from Jacob's disappearance, to his trial, to their personal aftermath. The family dynamics and character reactions of Rosellen Brown's Before and After gripped my attention and just propelled me through the story.