ALWAYS WATCHING
-A book review
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Author: Chevy Stevens
Reviewer: Oriel Collins
Plot:
In the lockdown ward of a psychiatric hospital, Dr. Nadine Lavoie is in her element. She has the tools to help people, and she has the desire: healing broken families is what she lives for. But Nadine doesn’t want to look too closely at her own past because there are whole chunks of her life that are black holes. It takes all her willpower to tamp down her recurrent claustrophobia, and her daughter, Lisa, is a runaway who has been on the streets for seven years.
When a distraught woman, Heather Simeon, is brought into the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit after a suicide attempt, Nadine gently coaxes her story out of her — and learns of some troubling parallels with her own life. Digging deeper, Nadine is forced to confront her traumatic childhood and the damage that began when she and her brother were brought by their mother to a remote commune on Vancouver Island. What happened to Nadine? Why was their family destroyed? And why does the name of the group’s leader, Aaron Quinn, provoke complex feelings of terror to Nadine even today?
Then the unthinkable happens, and Nadine realizes the danger is closer to home than she ever imagined. She has no choice but to face what terrifies her the most…and fight back.
Review:
In psychiatry, there is a rule that doctors are to remain impartial and maintain a professional distance so as not to become personally invested in their clients which serves to maintain healthy boundaries. This boundary is tested when Dr. Lavoie meets Heather, a fragile woman with a delicate beauty that is brought into her ward. She has a loving fiancé and comes from a wealthy family. What could have possessed her attempt to end her life? As Dr. Lavoie hears more of Heather’s story she begins to glean bits of information that seem to parallel her own early life. At first, she is merely curious about the spiritual center her patient mentions and is concerned as to who these people are and what influence they seem to have with her patient, but her curiosity turns to horror when she hears the name of the person running the center and realizes it is someone from her own past.
Someone she has been so determined to forget she has black holes in her childhood memories and suffers from claustrophobia so intense that even hypnotic regression and years of her own therapy have been unsuccessful in bringing the underlying cause of her terrible phobia and her lost memories to light.
This book is a blend of several mysteries wrapped up like an onion with layers to peel back, only to find the underlying skin of a new layer beneath. The mystery of the spiritual center, the mystery of Dr. Lavoie’s estranged daughter, and the deepest mystery of all: what secrets her lost memories will reveal.
The author is masterful at feeding the reader small flashes of the doctors returning memories, which are triggered by a horrifying incident at the beginning of the story and ending each chapter in increasingly disturbing cliffhangers that make the reader say “just one more chapter” and continue to turn the page.
We are taken bit by bit into Dr. Lavoie’s unusual childhood with a commune that preaches unity with the Earth, Free love, spiritual connection, and alternative way of living free from the social expectations and pressures of normal society. As the story progresses, however, we learn of a darkness within this group and a terrible price that has been paid by the group’s most vulnerable members.
The more Dr. Lavoie is forced to confront the demons she has repressed for so long the more we discover heartbreaking similarities in her daughter’s experiences and subsequent estrangement and the ways in which similar abuses often run through the family unit from unexpected sources. By the time her memories return in their entirety, the pace rapidly blows up, and real threats materialize from her past in their desire to remain hidden in forgotten memory. This time her own daughter has become entangled with the same group that she never had the choice to escape herself as a young child brought into their midst at the whim of her mentally troubled mother.
My only critique is my wish to have more of a maintained measured pace of recall that was so captivating at the beginning with more drawn-out suspense. Once the threat is revealed and becomes real and less mysterious, it rushes forward to an explosive ending that is almost anti-climactic as it is so quickly tied up it becomes rather formulaic.
Girl Power: 80%
Most of these characters are strong female leads, even in some of the characters who seem intent upon self-destruction. There is an element of romance yet it moves forward at the pace which Dr. Lavoie controls. However, many of the smaller less defined female characters are subjugated by the men in their lives, most notably Dr. Lavoie’s mother, who can only seem to follow the wishes of her abusive husband or the leader of the commune and gives little thought to the repercussions that befall her children whose lives are along for the ride of her whims.
Conclusion:
Always Watching is a thriller that sucks the reader in through small pieces of returned memory and the suggestions of a suppressed past darkness it uses powerful hints of estranged relationships and drops of suppressed memory. However, when these culminate into real enemies and danger, it rushes full speed ahead and wraps itself up almost too neatly and easily making me wish for more backstory and character development of less fleshed-out players. This is offset somewhat with a terrific villain (though I would have liked more background on him and his brother as well, in order to understand what had made them develop in this way), and a few quite gruesome crimes both past and present.