To tell you the truth, lately I’ve felt burned out on Sad Stories. While everyone was raving this summer about Light Between Oceans, I gave it a good-but-not-great rating, and most of that was honestly due to Sad Story Burnout.

I approached We Sinners with approbation. The blurb about the plot (an enormous---nine kids!---family who follow a fundamentalist religion) set off alarms in my head; you just know this is not going to be a happy tale.

It isn’t. But it isn’t just slopped-on, unremitting sadness either. There are the people who leave the religion (you expected that, didn’t you?) and there are the people who try desperately to follow the religion and fail (you probably expected that, too) but there are also stories of the people who the religion pulls out of the drowning sea and throws back on the shore.

I found that We Sinners is a story I’m raving about this summer. Sad Story or not.