Rachel (not currently receiving notifications) Hall's Reviews > Saving Noah

Superficial and overwrought look at a teenage sex offender with very little actual insight.

Saving Noah is classified as a novel of psychological suspense although I would more accurately describe it as a simplistic and superficial look at a family torn apart when fifteen-year-old son, Noah Coates, admits to molesting two six-year-old girls. As a popular A grade student who ran varsity track, attended mass and was an award-winning swimmer, mother Adrianne has never found the reasons for his actions. Sentenced to eighteen months in a juvenile detention centre Noah’s release in imminent but for devoted Adrianne, who has visited him weekly, and husband, Lucas, who has steadfastly refused to discuss his return home and failed to hide his disgust, Noah’s homecoming is a source of disagreement.

Already having had their lives in well-heeled Buffalo Grove decimated by neighbourhood vitriol at Noah’s behaviour, Adrianne is determined to protect and support her son at any cost and moves with Noah to an apartment whilst Lucas and eight-year-old daughter, Katie, remain in the new family home. With Noah’s parents at loggerheads, I was angered that Adrianne was so bitter towards Lucas and felt it was acceptable to put her young daughter at risk. With Noah having lost all of his interest in life, reluctant to leave the apartment and a target for bullies and vigilantes, the months after his release are littered with pitfalls including violent assaults and depression soon sets in.

Berry’s prose is clunky to say the least as the narrative moves back and forth between mother, Adrianne, in the wake of her son’s release and Noah during his time at the treatment facility. Although the author is a trauma psychologist and might well have researched her material I was unconvinced that the book gave me any astonishing insight into having a paedophile in the family with Adrianne’s rose-tinted perspective occupying the bulk of the novel. I certainly wouldn’t take anything from this novel as credence. Funnily enough, seventeen-year-old Noah earns the readers sympathy with his mature and honest outlook, his abhorrence of his crimes and his refusal to think for second that he should be pitied or given extra support. I would have liked to hear more from him and a little less from his overwrought mother because he made for a far more fascinating view of a complex character facing a future battling the condition. Meanwhile Adrianne refuses to see that her son as anything other than a victim.

The final chapter prior to the epilogue, written from the point of view of Lucas, left me with more questions than answers and I felt like it was deliberately thrown in for shock value or to fit the psychological suspense criteria. At less than 260 pages the story is obviously very superficial and I felt the character of Adrianne was utterly deluded. From hosting a dinner party to break the news of her son interfering with the young daughters of two sets of parents and expecting them to think that it was their duty to support each other and perpetrator Noah, to her galling attitude to Noah being somehow ‘better’ than his peers in the Marsh institute.