The Girl in Saskatoon: A meditation on Friendship, Memory, and Murder

by Sharon Butala

In 1961, a country singer named Johnny Cash picked her as his 'Girl in Saskatoon' and sang to her in front of a home-town crowd. A few months later she was murdered. The author was a friend of the murdered girl.

Genres: Nonfiction, True Crime, Canada, Memoir

259 pages, Hardcover

First published March 24, 2008

About the author

Sharon Butala (born Sharon Annette LeBlanc, August 24, 1940 in Nipawin, Saskatchewan) is a Canadian writer and novelist.

Her first book, Country of the Heart, was published in 1984 and won the Books in Canada First Novel Award.

As head of the Eastend Arts Council she spearheaded the creation of the Wallace Stegner House Residence for Artists in which Wallace Stegner's childhood home was turned into a retreat for writers and artists.[14]

She lived in Eastend until Peter's death in 2007. She now lives in Calgary, Alberta.

She was shortlisted for the Governor General's award twice, once for fiction for Queen of the Headaches, and once for nonfiction for The Perfection of the Morning.

The Fall 2012 issue of Prairie Fire, entitled The Visionary Art of Sharon Butala was dedicated to Butala and her work and influence.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Bonnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the Girl in Saskatoon is about a murder that took place in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan on May 18, 1962, I would not label it simply true-crime. The subtitle calls it “A Meditation on Friendship, Memory, and Murder”, and I agree; it is a meditation, though perhaps more about memory and murder than friendship. Some forty years after the crime Sharon Butala set out to gather the facts in hopes that she could find out who raped, savagely beat, and buried alive her former schoolmate, 23 year-old Alexandra Wiwcharuk. Part auto-biography, part biography, and part real-life mystery, this is a disconcerting but compelling story that, after a slow beginning, becomes a genuine page-turner.

I wasn’t too far into my reading when I thought the story sounded awfully familiar. By the time I reached page 95, I understood why. Evidently, near the end of 2002, Butala had given up her efforts to find out information about the murder and the investigation and had phoned the fifth estate: http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/ Canada’s long-running, award-winning investigative television show. One of the hosts, Linden MacIntyre [who incidentally has just won the 2009 Giller Prize for his own novel The Bishop's Man) decided to take on the case not long after this. In January 2004, the show aired an episode about Alex’s life and death. I recall watching that show, but I hadn’t remembered Sharon Butala being interviewed in it. After the CBC broadcast, a number of people approached the author to offer what details they remembered about the time of the murder and the finding of Alex’s body. Alex’s sister Ann said she and the rest of the family appreciated what Sharon was doing and offered to help, including giving background information about the family. Others suggested people to contact, and one story led to another. For a while Butala trailed rumours but decided it was a fruitless task; and that solving the case had never really been her purpose. But she and the program researchers kept following leads – they planned a follow-up program, and Butala was glad to have the information for her book, for her unsatisfied curiosity. In an interview she said that knowing she couldn’t solve the murder, she wanted to know how what happened to Alex had to do with who they were – young, decent girls growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, expected to think of marriage before career. More than who killed Alexandra Wiwcharuk, what does it mean, if anything? Why did her rape/murder become a part of the city’s lore, and why can we not forget it?

Back in the early 60’s, murders were rare anywhere in Canada, let alone in Saskatchewan. And as she said, things were quite different for women. Sharon Butala is only five years younger than my own mother, and much of what the author had to say about what society expected of girls such as herself and Alex and my mother, made me really think about what life for women was like then; I began to feel a more personal connection as I continued to read.

Even though Sharon went to the same school as Alex, they never really knew one another. And so, as Butala did her research, trying to learn more about who Alex really was, she invariably entered the political field: Alex, a former beauty queen, wanted to be a stewardess, but ended up going to nursing school, and on the night of her murder, she went out for a walk on the riverbank before her night shift at the hospital as an intern. The reaction to her murder may not be a surprise: many concluded that Alex was not what she appeared to be, that she must have been a slut or a tease, or otherwise to blame…the assumption was that, as we used to say, she got what was coming to her. Nasty things don’t happen to nice girls.

As Sharon learned more about Alex, she began to examine her own past. She wanted to make sense of that time and place. Central to the narrative is that evil can exist anywhere, any time, even during such innocent times and places such as Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 1962. Butala had completed university and was married when she found out about her former schoolmate’s murder. Her first reaction was: I knew her! She did end up conceding that she hadn’t really, that they had been mere acquaintances, but that still, there had been a link between them. They both lived in the days of rock ‘n’ roll, days when girls applied lipstick and tried to appear sexy, while remaining “pure” at the same time. My mom used to tell me how she loved dancing at “The Dew Drop Inn”. She married and had me at a very young age. I appreciate books that speak to me, pull me in, emotionally. Butala did that by telling this story – a story that isn’t over.

Alex’s family – in fact many people in the town of Saskatoon – have not forgotten that long-ago evening. Alex’s nieces still want to know who killed their aunt despite Linden MacIntyre telling them: You might be looking for a ghost here. As a result of this book, Alex’s nieces are actively involved in their own investigation, even though the police have not officially closed the book on the case – and if they’re unsuccessful? They have this to say: We’ll never let it go, so if it isn’t us, it will be our kids. Every family has a tragedy and this is ours.” They claim that many of the people they talk to don’t trust the police, that back then people were scared; that now they’re more willing to speak out.

Perhaps that’s why it appears that this decades-long case may well not have been investigated as thoroughly as it could have been. When Alex’s body was exhumed in 2004, more evidence was found. And on October 22, 2008 the fifth estate aired their follow-up program, with a repeat October 26, 2009. Read this book, then watch the show: http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2008-2009/the... if you want to learn more details about this fascinating case.

I could end with Sharon Butala’s words: Catch the murderer or never catch him, this story of evil keeps on touching people, devastating them. I see now that this story, simply, has no end.

But I’m not so sure about that; otherwise why should this book still be read, why should this murder not just be forgotten. The case is still open, and I believe there will come a day when it is discovered who murdered Alexandra Wiwcharuk that night. [book:the Girl in Saskatoon|2446496] hooked me, and there are details I have deliberately not included here that lead me to have hope.

[Tiff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Butala is a person who will dig, dig, dig until she is satisfied with the level of detail in her narrative. This kind of detail is irritating at first--if I had to read one more five-page description of the vastness of the prairies in Saskatchewan one more time, I was going to throw the book across the room.

BUT, I've got to say, once you get past the first fifty pages, this book is a gem. It serves to remember a girl who shouldn't be forgotten, who was brutally raped and murdered in 1962--a case that remains unsolved to this day. To truly know this girl, Butala reaches back to a more simple time in a once simple place: post-war Saskatoon, a place where people felt safe enough to sit by the side of the river at night, alone, even if that person is a 23-year-old nurse whose timeless beauty would attract the attention of men of all kinds. At the end of the book (which is truly disturbing, by the way), Butala has managed to paint a crystal-clear portrait of someone who easily could have become just another victim whose violent death will (more than likely) remain unsolved forever.

[Morgan Dhu · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Girl in Saskatoon, Sharon Butala's examination of the life and death of murder victim Alexandra Wiwcharuk, was of interest to me not just because of my fascination with certain elements of crime, violence and the human psyche, but because I, like the author, remember the girl from Saskatoon. Unlike the author, I never met her, but I lived in Saskatoon, a girl of seven years or so, in the aftermath of her death, and even as a child, I knew there was something about this death, mostly talked about in whispers around me, that was important, and unsettling. I had only just moved to Saskatoon, so I have not even a child's reminiscences of what life had been like before Alexandra Wiwcharuk was found dead by the river, but to this day, when there's a reference to her in lists of famous unsolved Canadian murders, or whatever, my breath still catches a bit and I feel something tense up inside. And sometimes I do wonder if it is my vague memories of this death that set me on the path to wondering about other such deaths and the people who deal in them - both the killers and the crime-solvers.

Butala as well talks, in her introduction, about the effect of Alexandra Wiwcharuk's death on her and on the people of Saskatoon - and of the effect that researching that death had on her understanding of why this death is so memorable to those even lightly touched by it.

"Forty-four years [after Wiwcharuk's death], at a social gathering in the same city, a well-known writer who had moved to Saskatoon only two years after Alex’s death said to me, “Do you know that Saskatoon people have never forgotten that murder. They all remember it, and they still talk about it.” I did know that, but the way he said it struck a chord deep inside me, plangent, heart-stopping, and catching me by surprise, as if this were news that I was hearing for the first time. His remark had been unprompted, and it was made with such conviction, expressing, at the same time, his surprise; his voice was even tinged with something that might have been awe. I knew that sound well, that mix of surprise, dismay, chagrin, bafflement, and wonder, but in the long years—a good ten by then—of my quest to understand Alex’s murder and the city’s continuing memory of it, and in my dogged gathering of myriad details, I had nearly forgotten. But he is right: it is extraordinary that her death is still remembered.

....When I began to wonder, as a writer, what her true story was, I meant by that only what exactly had happened the night she was killed, who the suspects were, and why no one was ever caught. I thought, if I thought at all, that if I knew those things, it would be enough. But as the years passed and I began to find answers to those questions, the more answers I found, the more inadequate they seemed; the more I discovered, the less I felt I knew. At last I began to see that, interesting as those answers might sometimes be, they failed to satisfy me because they were the answers to the wrong questions.

After some ten years of thinking, talking to people, asking questions, and reading old newspaper reports and whatever documents I could lay my hands on, I had finally come to see that the question that had to be the trenchant one, the real one, almost the only one, encompassing as it does all the other questions from Who did it? to What really happened that night? and Which of the many rumours about that night, about her killer or killers, are true? to How could such evil happen in our decent, small city? was this: Why this constancy of memory? And further: What purpose is served by it? In a world where horrific deaths on a vast scale — three thousand in a moment in New York City, thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq — in a world of suicide bombers, whose purpose, whose need, is it that we should never forget one pretty young woman’s death in Saskatoon? In the end, I began to see that the real question was less about the specifics of her murder and of the investigation, and more about why I needed so badly to know, why no factual answers satisfied me, why I, too, could not forget."

In looking for answers to those questions, Butala looks at the influences surrounding both Wiwcharuk's early life and her own - and those of many people living in and around Saskatoon at the time. The immigrant experience and Ukrainian heritage in Wiwcharuk's family. Growing up in a rural area, barely one step removed from pioneer conditions - if that. A childhood lived against the background of the Second World War. The experience of Otherness, of being at the bottom of the social ladder, shared by the Ukranian Wiwcharuk and the half-French, Roman Catholic Sharon LeBlanc. The veneration of the Virgin Mary common to both Orthodox and Catholic traditions. Butala also evokes the innocence of the times in which Wiwcharuk lived and died.

"When we graduated in 1958 there had been no school killings—no Columbine, no École Polytechnique , no Dawson College—no mass murders other than the Holocaust, a full understanding of which we were still trying to absorb, and no serial killers we knew of beyond Jack the Ripper in late-nineteenth-century London, England. We still believed in a righteous war against evil killers such as Hitler, and unquestioningly in the heroism of our soldiers. There was no Vietnam, no Desert Storm, no Afghanistan, and no Iraq (never mind Chechnya, Rwanda, the killing fields of Cambodia). No disappeared. No terrorists, no World Trade Center. No soldiers murdering their prisoners or torturing them, especially not Canadian soldiers. The innocence of the average young Canadian—other than for the incomprehensible but terrifying atomic bomb and the truly incomprehensible hydrogen bomb, and the deliberate murder of six million Jews—was otherwise pretty much intact. Even corruption in governing bodies was considered to be unusual and very limited; corruption belonged to gangs, to the mafia, to the criminal element in general. Everybody else, we thought, could be relied upon to be honest."

Another important element of the times, and the responses to Wiwcharuk's death, was the emphasis on the purity and innocence of unmarried women and the silence on matters of sex and conception. It was a time when "Girls were kept children, their sexuality under the tightest of control, for as long as parents and the rest of society could possibly manage." To go beyond the strict limits placed on a young woman's sexuality was to risk loss of reputation, and the social death of becoming an unwed mother. And yet, because no such limits were enforced upon young men, staying "respectable" was an ongoing struggle.

"In the fifties sexual choices were limited: don’t have intercourse or any kind of sexual relations; have intercourse but practise coitus interruptus; or settle for long, sweaty, frustrating, back-seat “petting” sessions. Most of us, in fifties Saskatoon, stuck to the latter. And that meant that some of us were raped. We call it “date rape” now, but in the fifties it didn’t have a name, and it was commonplace—not perhaps, actual rape, although it is likely that there were many more rapes than were ever reported—but certainly it was the rare one of us who had never been on a date where we had to fight physically to keep our virginity. Getting thrown out of a boy’s car, having to walk home, or going home bruised and crying, but with virginity intact—these things happened a lot."

In such an environment - one where murder was virtually unknown, where all the sexuality and crime and corruption was kept hidden, driven underneath social conventions and sequestered in the parts of town where no one decent would be seen, or admit to it, anyway - it was hardly a surprise that some would respond to Wiwcharuk's death by blaming the victim. Rumours circulated that she wasn't the innocent she appeared to be.

"There hadn’t been a murder in Saskatoon through our entire childhoods, and it is no wonder that we felt safe, and no wonder that when pretty, smart, decent Alex met her brutal death, the city was stunned, shocked, and beyond horrified. Finding no handy culprit, it turned to Alex as the cause of her own death—she had to have been responsible, because otherwise there would be a lot more deaths in the city, and of pretty young women. And that turned into the rumours of promiscuity, of involvement in drug crime, of “pregnancy without benefit of husband,” of affairs with married men, and of whatever other disreputable behaviour might lead to somebody wanting to kill you. In the minds of many people, unable to believe that a murderer was loose in our city, it had to have been her fault. I suppose it could even be said that if she had brought her murder on herself by her bad behaviour, then it could not be our fault—“our” being the citizens of our city."

In Butala's narrative, Wiwcharuk becomes more than just a young Ukrainian girl, she becomes a symbol of all the constrictions and contradictions that young women of her time, place and background faced, that Butala herself faced, the fetish of innocence and the frustrations of youth and intelligence subordinated to the socially constructed role of femininity. In her last clear memory of Wiwcharuk from their years at the same high school - a technical school intended for the children of the working class, and not for those expected to go on to university - Butala projects all the emotions that would, a few years later, fuel the Women's Liberation Movement.

"Thinking of that glance of Alex’s that I thought bored or sad, I sensed that she, too, felt the constriction of our lives: You must get an education, and Nice girls don’t do that, and Do as you’re told, when we had naturally such an abundance, a veritable torrent of life-desiring energy raging through us, at sixteen, at seventeen, at eighteen. We were kept children far too long in those days, girls especially. I think that was the source of our boredom, that and a simmering but buried rage at the absurdity of our position, which we did not recognize intellectually, so well-governed were we, but which dragged at us well below the surface calm of our lives. We yearned for what we thought was freedom, although instead of true freedom, we yearned for love, for a husband, for our very own family, because that was all most of us knew; it was what our culture taught us."

Wiwcharuk is always referred to, in media reports on the murder, as a nurse and "beauty queen." Wiwcharuk had attended nursing school in Yorkton after graduating from high school. In 1961, she moved to Saskatoon and began work at Saskatoon City Hospital. While living in Yorkton, she had won two local beauty contests; her beauty queen career culminated in being chosen the winner of a radio-sponsored contest promoting an appearance in Saskatoon by the singer Johnny Cash - a concert during which he gave Wiwcharuk roses and sang to her the song "The Girl in Saskatoon."

In her book, Butala explores both the realities and the social meanings of both images. In the 1950s, nurses were starched and virginal, handmaidens to the doctor-priests, an image of purity dealing with the corruption of the body, with disease and wounds and bodily fluids and death. Beauty queens of the tine, too, were images of purity, but also of desire, albeit the respectful, honourable desire a man should feel toward the blushing maiden on the threshold of marriage and motherhood.

"It seems to me that the very omnipresence of beauty queens and beauty competitions was a response to the prevailing cultural notions about women and their place in society. At some level, I think that this was a genuine effort to show proper reverence for the best in womanhood, an honouring of the idea of female purity, and a natural outgrowth of an age that, the rest of the time, did not much cherish the humanity and individuality of women. But the subtext was always pointing to the perfect “Moms” of television with their hair so well coiffed it looked shellacked, the chaste perfection of their attire, their unflappable calm, their wise love for their husbands and children, and especially, their complete willingness to sacrifice their own lives for them. Implicit in the “Miss Perfect Womanhood” of beauty competitions was the expectation of the marriage and children that would follow..."

For Wiwcharuk, there would be nothing to follow. The young nurse in her first job, the pretty girl who was presented to a music legend as "the girl from Saskatoon," was assaulted and killed on the banks of the Saskatchewan River sometime on the evening of Friday May 18, 1962. Her partially buried body was discovered on the night of May 31. Butala relates the known events of Wiwcharuk's last hours and the crime itself with journalistic dispassion.

However, her discussion of the investigation that followed when Wiwcharuk's death finally became known, and the way the police have handled the case throughout the years is raises questions about the long silence of the police who worked the case on many issues related to Wiwcharuk's death and on the lack of information made available to the public. Gaps and discrepancies resulted in rumours early on, which still circulate today, about police cover-ups.

In the end, the book seems to stop without really finishing, a conscious act because, as Butala finally acknowledges:

"I had wanted only to tell Alex’s story, her whole story, accurately, once and for all. Now I saw, too, that that was, and had always been, a hopeless task. The story had grown, year after year, it had rippled out farther and farther from Saskatoon, engaging more and more people, even into the next generation of women—including Angela, whose life had been turned upside down by the news of this long-ago murder—until the beginning and the end and the various middles were hopelessly confused, hopelessly complex, hopelessly compromised. If I felt desperate now, it was because, among other things, I saw at last that there truly is no straight line through this story, a neat beginning, a comprehensible middle, a tidy, satisfying end. I saw that the story was not even the one I had thought it was, not the one I had been trying so hard for so long to tell. The story was, instead, about story.

Somebody, a man, battered, raped, and murdered a beautiful young woman and buried her alive in a shallow grave on the riverbank in Saskatoon, in 1962. Catch the murderer or never catch him, this story of evil keeps on touching people, devastating them. I see now that this story, simply, has no end."

[Alexis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm from Saskatoon and I love Sharon Butala. This book is about the 1962 murder of a girl named Alexandra Wiwcharuk. She was a young nursing student and beauty queen who was brutally murdered. Her murder has never been solved.

Sharon, the author, went to the same high school as Alex. In this book, she retraces her life and Alex's life and the details of the murder. It's an excellent example of creative non-fiction.

I learned a lot about the history of Saskatoon by reading this book. I kept on going over to my parents and asking them questions about Saskatoon history.

I found this book to be moving, terrifying and rivetting. It's the story of a murder and the loss of innocence, but it's also a love song to Saskatoon.

[Cylia Kamp · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am so glad to have read this book. It was my first venture into the reading of Canadian literature. The facts that this grizzly murder took place in the "innocent" late 50's and early 60's, that people still said things like 'she got what she deserved,' that the investigation was mishandled, that numerous witnesses/suspects were not called to testify at the inquest. All these facts and more added to the swift pace of parts of the book.

On the other hand, some of the parts, which bored some readers and critics, the "reflection" parts, actually interested me the most-- thought provoking analyses of the nature of evil, how it spreads and grows, eventually touching most members of a small city, finally contributing to the personality of the city itself. Also the author's reflections upon whether in the end the most important task is to solve the mystery, or come to accept evil. For the victim, finding the perpetrator and having others hear (and live vicariously through) the details of her suffering affirms her basic humanity. Forgetting or not pursuing the investigation belittles the importance of her life and affects generations to come. But the story is so tangled with dead-end leads everywhere; misinformation abounds. As with this author all who become mesmerized by this story are finally fatigued by their inability to solve it.

Note: When I began this book, I wrote:

I'm fascinated by this story of a 40+ year-old unsolved murder case in Saskatoon. The writer, a native Canadian now in her 60's, is close to the same age as the girl who was killed, would have been. After moving as children into Saskatoon from the far northeast rural areas of Saskatchewan, they ended up at the same high school. They didn't really know each other well. Nonetheless Sharon Butala believes that they probably had much in common in the way of their pasts, family situations, and difficulties dealing with urban teenage culture of the '50s and '60s. Off and on for years she has often wondered about the murder. Finally she decided to research it. This is that story.

Sharon Butala has written other books and is especially adept at describing nature, weather, and reading foreboding skies, a talent and necessity she believes must benefit most people raised in the biting cold northern part of the province. After this book I look forward to reading more of her work beginning with The Perfection of Morning: An Apprenticeship in Nature.

[Colleen]

So long as clauses are punctuated appropriately, a writer can assemble multiple independent clauses in a single sentence; in fact, a properly constructed sentence can be extended indefinitely, which has been done for the most part in this book. These long sentences, whose clauses were often bracketed here and there, made the reading painful, necessitating the reading and re-reading of the same lengthy sentence to make sense of details. Hope you can find a better editor, Sharon. Yes, this seems to be a common remark on Butala.



Yet, it was so stark and hit some pain deep down for anyone not of this generation who grew up in Saskatchewan. Of course, the descriptions are riveting. Anything healing gets deep down, which this does.



Regarding the process of researching and her emotions, this certainly hits where anyone of her gender and generation feels it. This is pure Butala. She wasn't close to her, yet no one with more detail, like police or family has stepped forward to tell this story. Can this point be missed on anyone not from here? I was born just after this but didn't know about Alex and will certainly never forget her, which is one stated purpose for Sharon's writing this book.



I believe there are some inaccuracies in the book regarding facts. It is also quite disorganized. Perhaps that is why it is called a meditation.



Very laudable that she honours a murdered girl who would otherwise have been forgotten. I hope you can redo and republish.

[Sydney · Rating 1 out of 5]

Insulting.

[Cmw · Rating 4 out of 5]

Haunting, disturbing and mysteriously inconclusive. This book was far too close to home for me.
The story ended up being more about Sharon Butala in so many ways, which was interesting but not always relevant; it was not cleanly edited, with repetitive statements and rambling diversions. But it was also gripping and sad and horrific and rather impossible to put down. A wonderful analysis of the historical geographic class/racial/inequalities/bias in the city and province.
There are so many questions about danger, threats, corruption, fear, coincidence, inside information, etc. I certainly feel there is much more to this story than we know. I certainly get the feeling that all this haunted Butala for many years and she finally needed to just write what she could supposition and let it go, complete or not.
Let us hope that someone truly motivated and empowered to do so will eventually uncover the truth.

[MJ]

Butala is a great writer, and I wish I enjoyed her writing. She writes about things and places that are important to me, but I have so much trouble getting through her books! I was going to give up on this book (one I’ve meant to read for ages) because I was so bored, but then things got a little interesting. And then it got boring... but I persevered. And I finished. This book wasn’t what I expected, but I’m glad I finally got to reading it.

[Jane Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots if inforrmation about the life and times of this crime, but much speculation on the author's part with few facts. Granted, facts are hard to come by but this is a worthwhile story and one that should be remembered.

[Anique · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a tough one to get through. I would not have finished it if it weren't for the summer reading challenge at the library. I was hoping for more about the crime, but I found this repetitive with a lack of true direction. She was bouncing all over the place. Do not recommend.

[Rebecca Nagrodski · Rating 1 out of 5]

Was more of a meandering reflection on the author's time in Saskatoon with very little actual focus on the crime/victim. Also - I hate Saskatchewan.

[Pete Symenuk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had a more than casual interest in this book , partly because I remember the event very clearly And because of the horrific brutality of the murder, I also knew an uncle of Alex which certainly added interest And empathy to the story. It was a sensational story And rife with rumors of inept policing and of cover ups by the police force during the investigation.

[Lorraine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting story about Saskatoon, Ukranian settlers & the changing culture in 1960's

[Brenda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very sad this happened to Alexandra Wiwcharuk in 1962. And no closure for family. Is this person still alive? Has he killed again?
I also looked up the history of on this case.
Happy reading 📖 📚🫖🐈

[Trudy Jaskela · Rating 2 out of 5]

This murder occured when I was in going to nursing school in Saskatoon. It rocked the city. Rumours were rampant in regards to the identity of the killer. No female went out alone in the evening. The book descibed the culture of Saskatoon ansd Saskatchewan in 1962 - small city, naive, no big murders before, police failed to take clues seriously.

[Martha · Rating 3 out of 5]

unfocussed

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good read.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took a bit to get into but enjoyed it more as I got into it.