PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksLeaving the Witness offers an intimate—at times painful, at times humorous—exploration of what it means to leave not only a religion, but an entire life ... The 10 pages detailing her son’s death are the most impassioned, deeply felt, and alive pages in Leaving the Witness. Narrated in unadorned language, the prose nevertheless carries pathos. It’s as if Scorah has been holding us at arms’ length up until that point, and in the final 10 pages she pulls us close, demanding that we feel the force of the young boy’s death. This change in proximity is profoundly affecting; by the time we arrive at mourning, we are sutured to Scorah as our narrator and our protagonist, having traveled with her through so many different emotional phases: confinement, disorientation, ecstasy, freefall ... But this isn’t a story that elicits pity—if anything, it refuses it.
