This novel has an intriguing premise, with a middle-aged academic at a crossroads in his life renting his extra room to a woman just released from prison for shooting her husband, a snake-handling minister. They are drawn to each other despite their very different backgrounds.
My major complaint is that the woman, Sunny, doesn't seem to come from a different background at all. Her ideas, her interests, and her manner of expressing herself all give the impression of a slightly naive middle-class college student. Her young life in rural Illinois as the straying wife of a pastor seems not to have shaped her world view at all. The man, Jackson, doesn't fare much better as a believable character. He has some mysterious rough edges in the first chapter, but after that he's a two-dimensional anthropology professor. His existential crisis doesn't last beyond the first two pages.
Jackson and Sunny find themselves drawn not only to each other, but each to the other's former life too. Over the course of the book, it's almost as if each of them is taking over the expected future of the other. That would be an interesting development if I cared about either character.
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