You're contacting media contact of this press release

Title: Sincere, Thematically Rich: Explora Book Review Praises Karen East’s Sanctuary

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 10th Sep 2026 - ​The review identifies the novel’s split timeline as its most distinctive structural choice. One thread opens in 1998, when Rachel Anderson, thirty-four years old and fleeing a violent marriage, drives through a Wisconsin fog toward a life she can’t yet picture. Over the following decades, she builds a career defending other women, work that eventually puts her on the FBI’s radar. By the time renewed harassment catches up with her, Rachel is fifty-seven, and she retreats to the same corner of northern Wisconsin she once fled, this time an Ojibwe reservation, looking for somewhere the past can’t easily reach.The second thread picks up decades later, in a 2039 Minneapolis where daily life runs on ID swipes, sector permissions, and air-quality warnings; Homeland Security tracks residents’ movement between neighborhoods, and older citizens are quietly relocated without much explanation. Into this world East places journalist Janet Ryan, whose reporting eventually draws her toward the same Wisconsin reservation—and toward Rachel, now known to the community simply as “Old Woman.” The review describes the moment the two storylines meet as the point where “what starts as two lives separated by decades slowly tightens into one story,” as the state closes in on the informal network sheltering dissidents there.The review gives particular attention to East’s treatment of Indigenous spiritual practice. Drumming, tobacco offerings, and a wandering-spirit sequence near the book’s end are handled, in the reviewer’s words, “with evident care” and “lend the ending real emotional weight.” The review also calls the eventual convergence of Rachel’s and Janet’s stories “genuinely rewarding.” It identifies the novel’s central strength as it...

This press release is issued by King Newswire