by Christine Keighery
Publisher: Ultimo Press, April 2025
Review
by Karin Kos
Spiritual retreats have a lure for many people, but when your life is perpetuated with a sense of loss and disappointment, they become a place for solace and personal empowerment. Or do they?
Davitt Award-winning author, Christine Keighery has departed from her thirty-five novel successful career as a young adult author, to explore the secrets adults keep. In We’re Not Us Without You, Keighery explores loss, grief and success. She questions the way society dictates our sense of success through wealth and social position, amongst the backdrop of religious dogma. Where religion is a source for guidance and atonement for many, the author explores how religion can control one’s life and moral compass. For Lani, Stig, Tinker, and Maya their teenage friendship is thwarted when a video is innocently shared in a school community, wreaking havoc for the boys in the video. The fallout of this all too familiar situation is death, disgrace and social persecution in a society that does not understand teenage love.
Keighery exposes how through social media teenage lives can be disrupted and the repercussions are still felt sharply decades later. Where the boys used that video as supposed “proof”, the author encourages her reader to consider the real-life implications of oversharing moments that should be private. The consequences are devastating, leaving the teenagers in desperate need of healing. This need is met with unwavering faith in the Catholic Church by some characters, whilst others seek fulfilment through alternative spiritual experiences, when “searching for forgiveness”.
This inherent desire for community connection blunders into blind devotion, where Stig and then Tinker fall under the trap of Acharya, a spiritual healer who uses her knowledge of persuasion and suggestion with ulterior motives. Written as a didactic warning to her readers, Keighery asks her characters to be careful of who they trust and the motives of those who will easily exploit their pain and suffering. When Tinker believes that his life no longer has meaning, Her smile was kind. She was generosity itself. Tinker hadn’t felt this light for years. The reader can empathise with his trust for Acharya and his belief that his sense of personal emptiness might be filled by her off-grid community.
If you enjoy character driven plots and locations that are distinctly Victorian, you will have a strong appreciation for this novel. With characters that are disarmingly familiar and language that lulls you into the setting, you will find yourself wanting to know more, to find justice, and question how others can exploit our subconscious need for validation. An easy-to-read novel that broaches friendship, trust and loyalty in ways that feels at times quite unnerving.
Publisher’s blurb
Four friends. One secret. And the cult that could burn them all.
High school friends Lani, Tinker, Maya and Stig were inseparable until an unthinkable act shook the group. Now in their thirties, three of the friends are still close while Stig has disappeared completely, unable to face what happened in high school. With Lani’s wedding fast approaching, she is determined to bring the group back together. This leads them to a spiritual retreat where Stig has been living off-the-grid, and to Stig’s enigmatic partner – or leader – Acharya.
Is it too late to save Stig from himself? And will bringing him back into the fold threaten the silence that has been keeping them safe all these years?