Beyond This Point - Holley Rubinsky

Inside cover:

Over the course of one hot summer in the Judith Lake Valley, in the rugged interior of British Columbia, five women find their lives turned upside down by events they could not foresee, or refused to see coming. The long-time lover of a charismatic healer discovers that, this time, an affair will have lasting consequences. A woman on the verge of divorce and fearing the worst about her health tries to go home again and learns she has to go further. A girl who has depended on the sale of her body to get by returns to the valley sick and exhausted, bringing the child no one wants to remember. Just as her husband suffers a sudden stroke, a mother finds that her rebellious teenage daughter has done what she feared most. And when a grieving young widow from the East arrives to stay on the property of old friends, her visit brings surprising upheaval.

As these lives become entwined, a vivid portrayal of a community emerges. Behind it all is the wildness of the land, the threat of approaching fire, and a boy's simmering desire for vengeance, which erupts in a harrowing act.

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This book was written in such a way that it was sometimes easy to forget that you were reading the same story from one chapter to the next. Each chapter focused on one of the characters and often introduced other characters that had minor roles throughout the book or no recurrence at all. As I started the book, I had a feeling the characters would all end up in the same place and then the story would include all of them. However, it did not come to that point and the format continued to be a character per chapter. This is not to say that the characters never met, but I did not feel the connection as the inside cover indicates there to be. Over all, it was not a bad book. However, I felt myself waiting for that connection, the part where their stories becomes one, and so I can't say I really enjoyed it.