Wedlock
Denis Wright
One Tree House
pub. 2018

April 01, 2021

If you want something that is romantic yet still mysterious, you should pick Wedlock by Denis Wright. It had me captured from the first word. It catches your attention and makes you want to read it until one o’clock in the morning. The protagonist Lucy Sorrenson is someone that so many people can relate to. She is hardworking and too mature for her own age. She will captivate you from the moment she first makes an appearance in this book.

The storyline follows a girl who lives with her dad and boxing champion grandpa. She behaves as the adult of the household and never has any downtime. Strange people start appearing in her life, until she is taken away to a weird Christian community.

People start to worship her and call her the mother to the seed of earth, whatever that means, and she is set to marry someone against her own will in less than two months. Every day, she struggles to fit into the community and looks for ways out. She defies her new fiancé and tries to focus on getting home.

After a while, she slowly starts to settle in and almost enjoys living in the tiny community. She raises chickens, pigs and cows and a vegetable garden. She becomes so attached to these that she doesn’t want to leave and she feels especially close to the animals as they are trapped, just like her. She even starts to fall in love, but the problem is that it is not with her fiancé. It is with one of his servants called Stoic. She and Stoic tend to the animals alone almost every day and relate to each other a lot. Both of them want out of that place as much as they want in.

Wright has created a storyline with so many twists and turns you won’t be able to put the book down. As soon as you think things start to go right, the book always finds another way to surprise you. Wright has a way of making you connect to Lucy and make you want to find a way to help her, even though she is fiction. This is a breath stopping thriller and a must read. Wright’s attention to the slightest details make the story appear right before your eyes, he explains New Zealand’s beautiful rolling hills and dark secluded forests so well.

• Lucy is 13 and lives in Auckland.