The Believer is a product of several years of research, exploring six different belief systems and the people who hold them. Among them, we visit the lives of people who believe in UFOs and that aliens will some day come to earth, a conservative Mennonite family in the Bronx, and a woman who has hired a "death doula" to support her while she is dying of cancer.

Sarah Krasnostein is an incredible researcher and writer, and she has the ability to capture the essence of someone so perfectly. She is very clearly skilled at building rapport and trust with people from all walks of life, and is also the kind of writer where you can feel the breeze and know what kind of light is reflecting off someone's face. Like many people, I thought her first book The Trauma Cleaner was incredible and I was very excited to read this follow up.

Unfortunately despite the wonderful prose and some of the stories being interesting, The Believer failed to suck me in as much as I wanted and I found it a bit flat. I found myself skimming through whole sections, particularly the chapters about Mennonites and the Creation Museum. But I also can't help but wonder if maybe the book just wasn't FOR me. I'm a pretty staunch atheist and a bit of a skeptic, so I found it hard to relate to people with such strong spiritual and / or religious belief systems.

Highlights were the Death Doula and Halfway Home stories, of which I could have very happily read a whole book. The women in these stories were fascinating and were what kept me reading.