The Outreach Committee

Woodhams (Sweet Justice) capably crafts a tale of vengeance with a clever central concept. Since Mora Rey’s abusive husband died years ago in a skiing accident, she’s gone from being a belittled and controlled wife to doing empowering work at Los Angeles’s Battered Women’s Escape Foundation, which assists women fleeing from their dangerous husbands and rebuilding their lives. Yet Mora knows from experience that sometimes a more final solution is in order. She launches the Outreach Committee, helping victims like her colleague and friend Carol Ewald to escape their husbands by staging “accidents” like the one that took her own. As Mora and Carol gain confidence in their services, logistical and psychological complications arise. Unfortunately, Woodhams’s heavy-handed focus on the ubiquity of marital violence begins to overshadow the more subtle features of the story, such as the tender interactions between domestic abuse survivors. Male characters come across as cartoonish villains, lessening the impact of the violence. (BookLife)