Title: Sin of Ambition
Author: Mary M. McNaughton
Publisher: XlibrisUS
ISBN: 9781453559079
Pages: 267
Genre: Fiction
Reviewed by: Joe Kilgore
Pacific Book Review
Mary M. McNaughton’s novel Sin of Ambition, a young woman’s quest for accomplishment is an engrossing study of what we stand to lose when we set out to achieve one goal at the exclusion of everything else. Her heroine’s laser focus on success in life, as she herself defines it, threatens to blot out so many of the things that make life worth living. Decisions are made that can’t be unmade. Multiple lives are rent asunder. Even with the best of intentions, her pursuit of what she sees as perfection has repercussions she never could have imagined.
It’s the early 1960’s in Canada. Meg is a young college student intent not only on getting her degree, but also on attending graduate school. Try as she might to concentrate solely on her studies, she can’t help falling in love with Sam. She’s over the moon when Sam asks her to marry him. But they come from different worlds. Sam’s family is wealthy. Meg’s is decidedly working class. Plus, Meg carries another burden (as she sees it, though Sam doesn’t)—burn scars from her jaw to her shoulder. When Sam tells his parents he wants to marry Meg, Sam’s mother has a private conversation with Meg. She tells her that a poor, disfigured young woman is not what her son deserves, and that if they wed, Sam will be disowned and cut off completely. Feeling she would ultimately be ruining the life of the man she loves, she rejects Sam’s wedding proposal, and refuses to tell him why.
Subsequently she graduates, gets a better job in the hotel in which she works, goes to graduate school and achieves her MBA. While doing so, she impresses the husband and wife owners of the hotel chain and they offer to fund reconstructive surgery for her scars. But that offer comes with an unstated price—a potential association with their son. While Meg is determined to remain independent, she sees the opportunity for accelerated advancement, financial security, and enviable social status as too much to pass up. It’s the first of a series of decisions that will change her life inexorably over the next decade.
McNaughton is an excellent storyteller. She paces her narrative well without skimping on detail, description, or rich characterization. Meg and the people she comes in contact with are people you care about. Emotion and empathy are generated throughout without succumbing to maudlin sentimentality. You gladly go along for the rollercoaster ride of her life as she wins and loses and continually battles to stay true to what she believes in. Will her ambition truly turns out to be a sin? Or will it be the engine that propels her to see what’s truly most important in life. For readers who enjoy a good story well told, Meg’s journey in Sin of Ambition is one worth taking.
