by Angela Channell
“In THE LAST ONE HOME, the latest title by Jane Doe author Victoria Helen Stone, nobody can be trusted. Least of all your family.
Lies and the choosing of whose truth to believe has driven a wedge between mother and daughter Lauren and Donna Abrams, Stone’s steely protagonists. It’s through their voices that we alternately hear of how Lauren came to want nothing to do with Donna, whose spurious testimony sent Lauren’s father to prison for murder years ago…
The novel is psychologically complex due to these two competing voices, which Stone attributes to wanting to convey the real-life complexity of secrets and truth. “I really wanted to examine the truth as a three-dimensional object that can’t be entirely seen by one set of eyes,” she says. “Lauren views her mother through the lens of the difficult and twisted life they lived together. That’s all she can see. But Donna’s narrative offers an utterly different story from an utterly different woman than ‘Lauren’s mom.’”