Sam and Angie

Virginia Gillham is university librarian at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Like Margaret Sweatman’s critically acclaimed first novel, Fox (1991),
Sam and Angie explores a social ill—in this case, domestic violence
among the educated classes—and invests her exploration with insightful
personality analysis and interesting plot twists. The heroine is a
highly educated and seemingly capable lawyer who allows herself to be
manipulated by a control freak. As the plot unfolds, her relationships
with her husband and two male clients become increasingly inexplicable,
leaving the reader struggling to reconcile her apparent intelligence
with thoughts and actions for which the word “misguided” is far too
charitable. And the reader’s struggle is unaided by the author’s
contrived style and overuse of the stream-of-consciousness technique.