Act of Faith (by Erica James)

(Amazon UK link)

Rereading my large collection of Erica James books is enjoyable, in part because I have usually forgotten the storyline entirely. That was the case for ‘Act of Faith’, which I have just finished. Even though I’ve read it twice before, the last time in 2015, I had no memory at all for any of the people, or the plot. Even when I was reading, none of it felt familiar. 

I’m sure this is partly down to my increasing age. But also perhaps it’s due to the fact that the characters in these early books by Erica James, while three-dimensional, are not all that memorable. I’m not sure why that is. Some of them are very likeable: the accommodating, peacemaking Sarah, for instance, is probably my favourite character. Not that we meet her at the start of the book; the story is really about her oldest and best friend Ali. 

We meet Ali in sad circumstances, visiting a grave two years after a terrible, tragic loss.  Her ex-husband Eliot is also there, but they can barely exchange two words without acrimony. It’s a dramatic start to a book that has more than one overall plot, although they interleave in a satisfactory way. 

Ali must begin to find some way of working through her grief, more than throwing herself into her work as she has been doing. But Eliot also needs to find out what he feels, to forgive himself for what he has gone through. And Sarah has to fend off well-meaning attempts to persuade her to leave her obnoxious husband Trevor. She also has to work out how to live without her eighteen-year-old daughter Hannah who is travelling on a gap year, soon to go to university. 

These are the main characters, admirably supported by Ali’s gay colleague Daniel who is her other best friend and confidant. They all feel believable, albeit a tad caricatured at times. Trevor is the least likeable and also the least realistic in my experience: he has been a good father to Hannah, but can’t understand that she’s now an adult, and tries to control who she sees, how she dresses, and where she goes. 

Trevor is also something of a religious nutcase… and I say this from a position of faith, not the atheism that Ali professes. He is quite arrogant. He believes himself to be an evangelist, and that he is called to lead a house church as he has decided that his local vicar is too liberal. He regularly embarrasses Sarah, who has a quieter, deeper faith, and is fawned upon by some of the local folk who have joined his band. 

So it’s a good mixture of people and subplots, set over the course of a year when many things change. The writing is good, the conversations believable. It’s perhaps a tad long-winded at times, and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the caricatured group around Trevor, although there’s some balance, and one or two people with more balanced faith. 

It’s a story of friendships, of secrets and some lies. It examines the idea of trust, and faith in the best sense of the word. It made me wonder just how far I might go to help someone whom I cared about, and whom I thought was hiding their real feelings and needed to make changes. I’m not the impetuous and somewhat bossy person that Ali is, so I found some of her actions and statements rather arrogant. It was a good move to show her as vulnerable and grieving at the start of the book, or she would have come across as rather shallow, even a bit narcissistic. 

All in all, I liked this book very much, and will no doubt read it again in another decade or so, when I will probably have forgotten the story once again. Recommended if you like women's fiction of this genre.

Review copyright 2024 Sue's Book Reviews