The ending left me thinking: yeah, well, okay.

As the story reached its end, it became tragically obvious that there wasn't going to be any worthwhile payoff for the time invested. This story could have been written and much better told in significantly fewer pages, say maybe 250-275. Truth be told, after page 400 I started skimming A LOT of it, only stopping to read when something specifically caught my interest (not very often). Clocking in at 501 pages, the only reason why I stuck with it (for the most part) until the end was because it had me fooled as to content and story for more than the first half. The book was published in 1979 and I feel that it might NOT have been published had it been submitted today. There were A LOT of unnecessary scenes, scenes with secondary characters that really didn't have anything to do with the plot AND were, in and of themselves, not compelling. And while there were no glaring issues with the technical writing of this novel, there were issues with the story and its telling. Instead, it was more like a simple murder investigation involving a nun as the potential murderer of her newly born infant.

Based on the title and the cover, I went into this expecting some degree of demonic element in the book.

Algeria, Angola, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Benin, Bermuda, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Cape Verde Islands, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, Colombia, Comoros, Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Ecuador, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas), Gabon Republic, Gambia, Germany, Ghana, Greenland, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Macau, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mayotte, Mexico, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, New Zealand, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Saint Helena, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Somalia, South Africa, Suriname, Swaziland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Vietnam, Virgin Islands (U.S.In fairness, part of my disappointment is my own fault.

Unholy Child by Catherine Breslin