Thief of Innocence: A Novel

Luanne White
Booklogix Publishing Services (2011)
ISBN 9781610050838
Reviewed by Olivera Baumgartner-Jackson for Reader Views (2/12) 

 

When Laura decided to marry before even finishing high school in 1960, she was defying both her parents’ wishes and the socially acceptable norms of her era. Karl, her husband, chose a career in the military, and as a dutiful wife she both wanted and had to follow him. Although she tried really hard to please him, her marriage had more downs than ups, and living in military housing held its own set of challenges. While she certainly made some good friends, life in such a rough and tough environment was not exactly rosy, and her Northern upbringing made some of the Southern practices rather difficult to tolerate. As Laura slowly grew up, she wanted and needed change, and she had to make some very hard decisions.

There were parts of the book I enjoyed a fair amount, particularly those dealing with cultural differences and those that evoked a great sense of time and place, but overall I found both Laura and Karl extremely unlikeable, which made it hard for me to care about any of the happenings in the book. Granted, I have never been a military wife, and I have not grown up in the Sixties, but I simply could not understand Laura’s behavior and her tolerance of Karl’s conduct. As their marriage started to crumble, Laura did not always behave completely honorably herself, and that made it even more difficult for me to care. The unraveling of their union did little for my emotional connection to any of the characters, and I found the last part of the book somewhat forced and disconnected.

There were a lot of issues with sloppy punctuation, particularly in the sections with direct speech. In addition to that I found the flow of the book very slow, weighed down with way too much unnecessary detail and somewhat peculiar descriptions, such as the following excerpt:

“Led by her intuition, she pulled back the covers of the bed. There! In its dried composition lay the spoils of their copulation.”

Overall I believe that “Thief of Innocence” by Luanne White will appeal to those readers who are familiar with life in the military housing and those who remember the struggle of women who wanted to enter the workforce, but were strongly discouraged by their spouses. A word of caution though – some of the sex scenes are sort of explicit, and that might be a deterrent to more conservative readers.

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