REVIEW | Atheists Who Kneel and Pray by Tarryn Fisher

Name: Atheists Who Kneel and Pray
Author: Tarryn Fisher
Genres: New Adult, Romance
Publisher: Self-published
Format: Paperback
Source: Amazon UK
Rating: ★★★★★
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Yara Phillips is a wandering muse.
She dates men who need her, but always moves on to something new, never staying in one place for very long.

David Lisey is in need of a muse.
A talented musician lacking lyrical inspiration. When he first sees her, he knows he’s found what he’s been looking for.

Yara believes she can give David exactly what he needs to reach his full potential:
A broken heart.

David’s religion is love.
Yara’s religion is heartache.
Neither is willing to surrender, but religion always requires sacrifice.

KEY WORDS: Soul mates, true love, broken families, running away, psychology.

I’ve said this time and time again, but Tarryn Fisher is without a doubt, one of my all-time favourite authors. She writes what is important to her at the time of her writing and each book is an insightful, picking apart of the thoughts that constantly eat at us. More than anything, I find her books are about human psychology masquerading as thrillers and romances. Atheists Who Kneel and Pray is no different.

I do not think this is a romance. It’s about love – romantic love, platonic love, and parental love – but it would be foolish to go into this book thinking it’s going to be focused on that. Instead, it looks into Yara and David’s relationship with a microscope, picking out feelings and moods and how a love can get under your skin and infect your life until you can’t function with or without it.

My only, and tiny, quibble was that Yara, a supposed Brit, had an exceptionally Americanised narrative voice. It annoyed me at times, and even more so when they started talking about cockney rhyming slang in a very touristy way as opposed to someone who lived in London her whole life. I doubt it will annoy anyone else, but that’s just me. Too American for a British woman…

Yara was a fantastic protagonist. As always, I aligned myself with her and that made me psychoanalyse myself along with her. My good friend, Melanie, wrote in her review something which I have to quote because it summarises how Tarryn always makes me feel and this book did that more than ever: “Tarryn Fisher always makes me feel like all my broken parts are on display, but she somehow makes me feel proud of them.”

For a long time, I ran away from a lot of problems, especially those with my family and mental health. I went to the other side of the world for half a year to get away. I ran away from love. I was scared for so long. This book put my feelings, my actions, in black and white for me to see and judge for myself and I’ve never been more glad that came home. I faced my pain and I’m stronger for it.

This book is a beautiful, soul-searching look into relationships, love, jealousy, and finding who you are when all of that is gone. This book is important, eye-opening and heartfelt. Thank you, Tarryn, for your words, because they keep me whole now, even if I wasn’t then.