#BookReview ‘Idle Hands’ by Cassondra Windwalker

About the book…

You can call me Ella. You generally assign me a whole host of other preposterous monikers. I think the least imaginative name I’ve heard is “the devil”, but I’ll answer to it if I must.

After making the courageous decision to leave her abusive husband, Perdie and her three young children start over and finally find the safety and love they deserve. But years later, when tragedy strikes, Perdie is left wondering if the choice she made to leave has led them to this moment.

If she were given the opportunity to take it all back and stay, would she?

In a frantic bid to protect her family, Perdie makes a deal to do just that. But in a world where the devil pulls the strings, can Perdie really change the past?

Brimming with enlightened observations and brilliant voice, Idle Hands is a haunting examination of grief, resilience, and what we’d give to spend another moment with the ones we love

Huge thanks to the fab Peyton at Agora Books for inviting me to read ‘Idle Hands’, which is out on July 23rd in paperback.

*I don’t normally say this, but there are trigger warnings for domestic violence and survivors of trauma in this book*

The beginning I found a little disconnected, why was this italicised narrator forshadowing doom , kind of like the Greek Chorus in plays where they would provide the bridging gap between audience and actors, so it took a while for me to get the gist that this was ‘Ella’ or ‘the devil’ as the puppet master of the protagonists fate.

Or is she?

How many of the decisions that we make are truly concrete and can we ever go back and change them? Is it an inability to deal with the consequences of our actions which leads to the situation as described in ‘Idle hands’, where the choice to leave an abusive relationship has far reaching repercussions? Or is it that Perdie was unsatisfied, having done the best that she could, not having the reward that merited her running away from her husband, Matt?

In a society where the single parent , especially the woman, is seen as a failure, and the support networks established to help victims of abuse are paltry at best, this is morally the right decision to make, to leave, so when Perdie is punished via the use of her young son’s future actions, she makes a deal with the devil to go back, stay and see if things turn out differently.

This is where I had difficulty in trusting the story, as it were. No life changing decision is ever done quickly or willingly, and abdicating your choices and responsibilities for them to an outside entity such as Ella, to me, robs Perdie of her agency. Up till that point she had made a difficult choice to leave. She has thought this through, her children were at the forefront of her mind and later , she is convinced that the overheard conversation that she had with her friend at the very beginning of the book has planted the seeds for her son’s future.

Without giving away any spoilers, this is a moral and ethical dilemma in which a woman painted into a corner begs for the chance to go back and change things. But as we all know from fiction and the movies, alter one thing from the past and it does not guarentee that what you replace it with will be any better…in fact it might even be worse.

This was an intriguing, one shot read where you devour the book whole, then ruminate on it in a ‘what would you do in this situation’ type of mind game. It takes a fundamental issue of domestic violence and applies a ‘what if…’ narrative that opens up possibilities for alternate endings. However, the commentary on the social perspective on the perpetrators of abuse, and the treatment of those victims really rams home hard. Until that fundamental sea change and blame culture changes, any decisions made by those trying to leave will be held up for judgement.

About the author…

Cassondra Windwalker earned a BA of Letters at the University of Oklahoma. She parlayed that highly marketable degree into degrees in bookselling and law enforcement before pursuing her writing career full time. She criss-crossed the country and then settled into happy seclusion on the coast of Alaska with a zombie cat, a useless dog, and a devoted husband. Her poetry, short stories, and essays have been published in numerous literary journals.

Twitter @WindwalkerWrite @AgoraBooksLdn

Links-https://www.facebook.com/cassondrawindwalkerwrites?ref=hl