Review: A Strange Penance

A Strange Penance by Cassandra Byrne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a 3-star review. More like 3.5 stars but not enough to push it to 4.

This is a pretty good story about a guy who just wants to go back to a time when his mom read him books. But life hands him a shit sandwich and he ends up being a pretty rough and tumble character in trouble with the authorities and set on a bad path.

Things go bad. And then worse. And a little better. If you don't think about the plot much, this is a pretty good story. By the end, I wanted to know more about the characters.

But it ends just as the characters and the story are going someplace. It really felt like the start of a pretty good novella rather than the beginning-middle-end of a short story. Kind of frustrating, but in a good way.

However, when you think about the story, there are a couple of elements that really stick out. The first is the power imbalance between our anti-hero and his benefactor. In any other tale, we would questioned the benefactor's motives and certainly questioned whether the power imbalance would allowed any long-term relationship to be legitimate/successful.

The second is that the relationship between our anti-hero and his benefactor at the end of the story isn't really earned. A little work...just a couple of sentences...earlier in the story to justify the later relationship would have been enough. Call it Chekov's Love Gun.

I'm not giving away the details as I don't want to spoil the story. It is worth a read. Give it a buy/try.

View all my reviews

Minor edits for grammar 2/20/2025