Review: Home Truths - Charity Norman

Review: Home Truths - Charity Norman - August 2024

I picked this one up on my Kindle while scrolling the other day and landed on Home Truths by Charity Norman. I'd heard her name before she's based here in New Zealand now but I honestly had no idea what I was walking into.

The first chapter drops you straight into a courtroom, with Livia (who I quickly clocked as the mum of the family) on trial for torturing a man, waiting on the jury's decision. Then the book pulls back to the beginning, to show exactly how this ordinary family fell apart, domino by domino. It starts with her husband's brother dying, and from there Scott spirals into health-conspiracy territory , the rabbit-hole kind, the kind that turns extremist, especially once he starts watching videos and corresponding with a man called Dr. Jack. Meanwhile their daughter Heidi starts shoplifting, using the guilt and pain of it as a strange outlet for everything she's been bottling up.

This is a proper slow-burn , we don't find out who Livia actually "tortured" until right near the end. And when the word finally lands? Honestly, it wasn't anywhere near as dark as where my mind had already gone. What it really is, underneath the courtroom framing, is a mother doing everything she can to find her son before it's too late and a man standing in her way because he's the only one who knows where her family is.

I'd actually tried this book back in November 2024 and DNF'd it. Coming back to it now, it finally clicked, and I think a lot of that is personal , my partner's family holds some strong health conspiracy beliefs, the same ones this book explores, and reading it with that in mind made everything feel painfully real. It's easy to judge from the outside, but Norman makes you see how someone slides into that mindset while genuinely believing they're protecting the people they love.

This is such a New Zealand novel in its pacing, slow, patient, willing to sit with discomfort but it doesn't shy away from the edgier stuff either. Now that we're a few years past Covid, it's easier to read a character like Scott and recognise him. We all know someone who went down that path, and watched it strain or break relationships along the way.

A quiet, thoughtful gut-punch of a book. 3Ps from me.

Amazon: https://amzn.to/4vT4nzI