I received an advance listening copy of this book thanks to the publisher and to Libro.fm. All opinions are my own. Book on sale July 21, 2026.
The premise of this book sounded really promising. A suspense type story, set over one weekend, on a somewhat remote island. Guests have gathered on Wakefield Island for the wedding of Shay and Andrew. Andrew’s family, the Pruitts, are wealthy, keeping a second home on the island, and splashing out on an elaborate weekend of celebration. But all anybody can talk about is the fact that the bride has recently left a strange cult called Synanon. How did she get away and is she truly finished with them? I was getting vibes of The Wedding People with a darker, more sinister tone.
The story is told through three different perspectives (each handily narrated by different narrators in the audio version, which I always appreciate). We have a few chapters from Shay herself but primarily we hear from her younger brother, William, and her college friend Joel. We know that William and Shay have not spoken much since something happened between them at her engagement party and we learn that it was following Shay’s engagement to Andrew that she became involved with Synanon. William and Shay were once close, growing up in a fraught household, and their father has died not long before Shay’s engagement.
William was supposed to come to the wedding with their Aunt Eleanor but when he goes to her home to pick her up, he finds that she has died. William chooses to pretend this hasn’t happened and goes to the wedding alone, not telling anybody else about Eleanor’s death. This decision, which comes fairly early on, does an excellent job of telling us almost everything we need to know about William’s character.
Joel has come to the wedding with his girlfriend, Carmen. He also hasn’t spoken to Shay recently and they have drifted apart in recent years. We learn that he went to visit her once while she was living with the cult. And we learn that maybe Joel shouldn’t have come to this wedding at all.
The sections from Shay’s perspective all take place before the wedding weekend, bringing us back to her university days, her first interactions with Synanon, and how she went from being a recently engaged law student to a college drop-out with a shaved head, living in a cult.
The problem, I think, with cult novels is that you have to convince readers that the cult is attractive, while also maintaining the inherent creepiness of cults. It’s a hard balance to find and I have yet to read a book where I’ve thought, Yes, I might join that cult. Unfortunately, I didn’t think Beaird was successful here. At no point did I understand why Shay made the decisions she makes. If anything, I found her to become a less sympathetic character the more I followed her. Similar to Shay, I increasingly disliked Joel as I spent more time with him. William I found to be more sympathetic though not necessarily a character who is making choices interesting enough to follow him.
The setting of the island does work well. It obviously creates a certain amount of innate tension as the characters are all stuck there to a certain extent. Beaird does a good job too of showing the separation of a family like Andrew’s from the locals of the island. Though the Pruitts claim a certain ownership of Wakefield Island, the locals see them as outsiders and hold them at arm’s length. Class is a frequent theme throughout the novel, a factor in Joel’s upbringing as well as William and Shay’s. Joel grew up wealthy but has rejected his parents’ plans for his life. William and Shay grew up without wealth but with parents who sought many of the trappings of money and made sure to surround themselves with wealthier people.
The story is supposed to be set in the 1970s but I found this didn’t seem important to the plot at all. There really wasn’t much within the story itself that felt like it couldn’t have had a present day setting and being occasionally reminded that we were in the 1970s kept jolting me out of the story. Synanon as a cult didn’t feel reminiscent of the free love, hippie-style cults that you hear about from that time. The one benefit I saw was that we don’t expect anyone to have cell phones but I feel like the whole thing could have been set in the 1990s with the same result.
Overall, this was a bit of a miss for me but there were moments of strong writing, so I wouldn’t necessarily turn away from a future book by this author.
Karissa Reads Books 