by Liz Nugent ★★★☆☆
Strange Sally Diamond opens with our titular protagonist lugging the body of her father to the incinerator on their property. Her father had joked in the days leading up to his death, saying "When I die, put me out with the trash. I'll be dead so I won't know any different." Sally felt compelled to follow his instructions, because that's just how she is: Weird. Off.
Strange.
What starts out as an exploration of a strange 43-year-old woman living in Ireland expands to fill in the gaps on why Sally is the way she is. She wasn't just born this way -- although I do think there is a good bit of genetics at play, and she certainly seems to be on the autism spectrum -- but instead she suffered trauma in her childhood that contributed to many of her problems. Sally has no memories prior to her 7th birthday, and as we fill in those first 7 years and watch Sally learn about and process what happened to her, it's tragic and heartbreaking.
Sally's likely autism, combined with the intense childhood trauma she suffered, creates giant barriers to her living any type of normal life. Her mother died long before her father, and so following his death, Sally is alone for the first time in her life. As she starts to chip away at the barriers of her past and her condition, one can't help but cheer for her as she slowly progresses toward being comfortable with her newfound independence and becoming a functioning member of society.
Sally's journey toward some type of normalcy isn't done in anonymity, though. Her decision to try to incinerate her father's body made national news and put her name and picture on the front page of the Irish papers. It also exposed who she actually is (Sally Diamond is not her birth name). That means that everyone she comes in contact with in her small Irish town now knows her tragic childhood story. That publicity also means that people connected with her past know who and where she is, after almost 40 years of having no knowledge of what became of her. Did I mention that the person responsible for her childhood trauma was never captured and seemed to disappear into thin air?
Sounds really compelling, right? At about the halfway point of the book, I was into it. I was captivated by the gradual reveal of Sally's past, and I could see several scenarios where Sally -- naive and strange and unaware -- might be hunted or forced into a reconnection with people from her past, which could lead to a tense and thrilling second half of the book. But it's a 3-star book for me for a reason: none of those options played out. Instead, things got even more depressing, and it ended leaving me feeling empty and disappointed.
It's not terrible -- it's nearly a 4-star book for me -- but I wanted it to be so much better, and I think that it had all of the ingredients to be. Sally is a one-of-a-kind character, and I'll remember her filter-free strangeness for quite some time. But ultimately the choices Nugent made with the second half of the book left me wishing things went a different direction, and for that reason this as just an average read for me.