Book: You Did Nothing Wrong by Cg Drews
Reviewed by Halliday in the Books
Rating: 5/5
It has always been Elodie and her son Jude against the world, but it has also always been the two of them against each other. Elodie really wants to be a good mom, but her circumstances are not easy. Jude is an especially challenging kid to raise. Her parents weren’t great examples, nor were they terribly supportive when she became a teenage mother. They give her a place to stay but not a foundation to grow from. She gets by largely from the charity of her dance instructor turned employer, and knows that won’t last forever. Of course when a gorgeous and wealthy foreign boy swoops in and falls head over heels for her, she hitches her wagon to his.
She marries him as quickly as she can and moves to the US with him into the home that he owns. It’s where he grew up, he’s been renovating it, and it’s now where he wants to raise their family. He paints such a beautiful picture that Elodie can’t see the danger in it until she’s on the other side of the globe with nothing to her name and everything in his. She’s willing to tolerate the arrangement until the need for control starts to bleed into Jude’s care.
This book is not going to be for everybody, but it is definitely for me. It is dark and twisted in ways that will make you deeply uncomfortable all the way through. Elodie is not a reliable narrator, and she has a much more favorable view of her behavior than the reader can. It becomes clear very early on that we are seeing this story through the eyes of an abusive parent to an undiagnosed autistic child. She works very hard to convince herself that she isn’t. Repeatedly, she tells herself that she’s having the appropriate reaction to the circumstances. Over and over, she tells herself “you did nothing wrong.”
It’s not always a pleasant vantage point. This isn’t always a “fun” read, but it’s extremely well-executed. I have a deep appreciation for a book that presents me with an immoral character and then forces me to have sympathy for them. I especially love when I can understand why a character behaved the way that they did, but still can’t forgive them. Drews hits that mark perfectly. The chronology jumps around in Elodie’s timeline. It gives numerous glimpses of her childhood and early motherhood that explain her inability to cope with her present. However, her actions are not inevitable. They are a result of her decisions, and yet we can also see what makes her decision-making faulty.
I believe this would be a visceral story for any reader, but it becomes all the more potent when it’s recognizable. Both my child and I are neurodivergent, and there are familiar elements in here. Thankfully neither of us has endured anything nearly so extreme. Still, I know what it’s like to feel ignored or disliked for being too much. I know what it’s like to have to take a moment and remind myself that my child is not giving me a hard time, she’s having a hard time. Those hints of similarity brought this narrative much closer to home. However, I’ve managed to build a life packed full of the supports we need to comfortably function. Elodie has not.
Elodie is not the only threat to Jude’s well-being in this book either. This is partially because she won’t let anyone look too closely into his needs. It’s also because she’s not the only one with a dark past or warped motivations. They all like to believe that they did nothing wrong, under the circumstances. The characters are all injured and flailing in their own ways, desperate for something solid to cling to. They hurt one another repeatedly whether they mean to or not. A heartfelt author’s note tells the reader that if you were ever the child in that sort of situation, the only one who did nothing wrong was you.