Arlene McKanic

FictionDebut Fiction

Finding freedom and friendship in Norway

Review by Arlene McKanic

If there’s a life before this one where people are allowed to pick their parents, the two young protagonists of Rebecca Dinerstein’s debut novel came up snake eyes, or nearly so. Three out of four of the parental units are nutcases; monstrously self-absorbed and melodramatic in ways that would suck the air out of the hangar of a jumbo jet. The one good parent, the Russian immigrant baker and father of Yasha, can do nothing against the energies of his estranged wife, even though he hasn’t seen her for 10 years. The parents of Frances are a tag-team of lunacy, made all the more unbearable by the fact that they all live in a New York apartment so tiny there’s hardly room for the fold-out bed in the living room. What can Frances do but escape to the back of beyond? In her case, this is Norway’s slice of the Arctic Circle, a place where the sun never sets during the height of summer.

Actually, Frances does have a reason to be in Norway. She has fled to an artist’s colony where she and this odd chap named Nils are the only artists. Their task is to paint a barn. Yasha also has reason to be in Norway, and that’s to bury his beloved father, who wanted to be interred at the top of the world. He is accompanied by his uncle and, alas, his mother, Olyana, who is incapable of toning down her self-obsession even a little bit.

Lots of writers have a place, real or imagined that simply possesses them. For Dinerstein, at least at this point in her young career, it’s northern Norway. She has already published a collection of bilingual poems set there, and she’s clearly enraptured by its austere beauty. It is a place of peace that encourages forbearance, if not forgiveness. The Norwegians are accepting, if a bit strange for living in a place of perpetual daylight. And Yasha and Frances are drawn together by the screwiness of it all. It seems that for Dinerstein’s characters, the sun does still shine in the darkest night after all.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If there’s a life before this one where people are allowed to pick their parents, the two young protagonists of Rebecca Dinerstein’s debut novel came up snake eyes, or nearly so.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Heading North for new lives

Review by Arlene McKanic

One of the more ghastly aspects of the American Civil War was that it was really the first time that the young country was confronted with mass death. More than 600,000 people died in the war, a number that people couldn’t really wrap their minds around—and the government offered no rituals or protocols to deal with such carnage. Often, soldiers were simply buried in mass graves on or near the battlefields where they fell. Séances were the rage as bereaved friends and family members tried to contact the dead; even the Lincolns held séances at the White House. Added to this were millions of freed slaves who were desperate to reunite with loved ones, both those separated from them by war and those they were parted from by slavery.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s second novel, Balm, follows a group of refugees who meet in the bustling, reeking and bewildering city of Chicago. There’s Sadie, a young widow who lost her husband in the war and soon discovers she has the terrifying gift of being able to channel the dead. Madge, the fierce “root woman” healer, has come up north from Tennessee. Hemp, an ex-slave, has fled Kentucky to find his wife, Annie, who was sold away before the war—and also to find her daughter, whom he believes he wronged. Of all the characters, Hemp is the one most concerned with doing the right thing. Even as a slave, he waited for a preacher to properly marry him and Annie. When he and Madge meet in Chicago, he can’t give into her blandishments because he is a married man, even though he doesn’t know if Annie is alive.

Perkins-Valdez, author of the acclaimed 2010 novel Wench, has a genius for placing the reader in the postwar welter of a city and the quieter but no less troubled farms of the South. The reader wants the best for these wounded characters, and whatever happiness they find in the end is hard won. Balm doesn’t just apply to Madge’s potions, but to the comfort that comes from human connection.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s second novel, Balm, follows a group of refugees who meet in the bustling, reeking and bewildering city of Chicago.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A masterful modern fairy tale

Review by Arlene McKanic

The latest work from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison is puzzling until you realize that it’s actually a fairy tale. How else to describe a story about a woman who is so bereft without the man in her life that the lack of him causes her to regress back to childhood—literally. Bride, the book’s beautiful, very young cosmetics tycoon, slowly loses all the physical signifiers of womanhood. Even the holes in her pierced ears close up.

Also strange are the circumstances of Bride’s birth. Named Lula Ann Bridewell, she is born a dark-skinned baby to parents who take refuge in their light skin and “good” hair. The sight of Lula Ann repels them to the point that her mother doesn’t want to touch her and insists she call her “Sweetness” instead of “Mother.” Lula Ann’s father eventually abandons his wife and child altogether. The reader believes that Sweetness’ hard-heartedness comes not only from her internalized racism but also from a desire to protect her daughter. 

Sweetness also mentions that her husband was a porter and that Lula Ann was born in the ’90s. At first, this reviewer thought it was the 1890s, but no, Lula Ann was born in the 1990s, which makes her parents’ attitude even more disturbing. Do light-skinned African American parents still reject their dark-skinned children? And who names a child born in 1991 or so “Lula Ann”?

But again, this slim and accessible book is a fairy tale, and fairy tales are timeless. It’s not so much about race but about wounded children, not to mention how pain is passed along—and how pain can be healed, at least partially. Bride has been hurt by her mother’s rejection and has hurt others in return; her lover has been forever scarred by the murder of an adored older brother.

Though this will likely be considered a minor work from one of our greatest novelists, God Help the Child is gracefully written and full of surprises.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The latest work from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison is puzzling until you realize that it’s actually a fairy tale. How else to describe a story about a woman who is so bereft without the man in her life that the lack of him causes her to regress back to childhood—literally. Bride, the book’s beautiful, very young cosmetics tycoon, slowly loses all the physical signifiers of womanhood. Even the holes in her pierced ears close up.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The desire to be good

Review by Arlene McKanic

Set in upstate New York just after the Civil War, Jeffrey Lent’s latest book is a bit puzzling. To be blunt, it ends just when things are getting really interesting. It’s not that things haven’t been interesting from the beginning: By page three we’ve been witness to a double murder. The murderer’s name is Malcolm Hopeton, and he’s returned from the war only to find that half of his farm has been sold out from under him and his wife is canoodling with his hired man—the type who, in the old days, would have been called a cur. In his fury, Malcolm even injures his hired boy, Harlan Davis, who has witnessed the whole tawdry mess. As for Malcolm, he resigns himself to the gallows. But will he hang, after all?

In between the murder and the book’s non-ending, Harlan heals up and goes to work for young widower August Swartout; Harlan’s sister, Becca, is already keeping house for him. The book then turns its focus from a spectacular crime of passion to the quieter rhythms of the labor that goes into running a farm. Most of the people we meet follow a Quakerish/Shakerish religion that values honesty, humility, hard work and an overall, austere decency. Observing that hard work and decency is where the novel’s real pleasure lies.

Lent, whose 2000 debut novel In the Fall was a bestseller, is known for his breathtaking and detailed descriptions of the land and nature. His characters’ speech is so rich and lyrical that it reminds the reader of J.M. Synge’s western Irishmen. One lingers over dialogue discussing the qualities of mules, the castration of pigs, the harvesting of oats and the making of jam, bread and pickles. Most impressive is the smallest person’s determination to be and do good in the face of calamity. And though he may dread having to tell the whole truth about his boss’ late wife and her paramour, no one wants to do good more than Harlan Davis.

Maybe A Slant of Light doesn’t deliver the resolution one might want from a modern police procedural, but its other virtues more than make up for it.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Set in upstate New York just after the Civil War, Jeffrey Lent’s latest book is a bit puzzling. To be blunt, it ends just when things are getting really interesting. It’s not that things haven’t been interesting from the beginning: By page three we’ve been witness to a double murder. The murderer’s name is Malcolm Hopeton, and he’s returned from the war only to find that half of his farm has been sold out from under him and his wife is canoodling with his hired man—the type who, in the old days, would have been called a cur. In his fury, Malcolm even injures his hired boy, Harlan Davis, who has witnessed the whole tawdry mess. As for Malcolm, he resigns himself to the gallows. But will he hang, after all?
FictionLiterary Fiction

Psych-out

Review by Arlene McKanic

Halfway through Rachel Basch’s third novel, The Listener, the reader gets the feeling that the title is ironic. Malcolm Dowd is a psychotherapist at the college in his town. His job is to listen; no doubt his skill at listening has saved the sanity or even the lives of the sad people who unburden themselves in his office. But when it comes to his own loved ones, Malcolm Dowd is about as deaf as a stump.

Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the loved ones Dowd listens to the least are the women in his life. These include his daughters Leah and Susannah; Cara, a musician who’s his off-and-on lover; and Jane, the betrayed wife of his feckless colleague. In Dowd, Basch seems to be describing the legions of men who feel astonished, annoyed and even betrayed when the women in their lives have problems, anxieties and secrets that don’t involve the men in their lives. Plus, Dowd is certain that he knows what’s best for these females—he’s a man, after all, as well as a shrink.

Fortunately for Dowd, a type of salvation might be found in his new patient, a college kid named Noah. Noah’s problems are more complex than Dowd is used to handling, and this alone is a source of fascination for the older man. Noah’s troubles force Dowd to truly attend to him. Also, the talented and exquisitely sensitive Noah is a great listener himself, especially to the women in his life: like his eccentric, if loving, mother and a Titian-haired friend who’s as conflicted as he is.

Basch is good at plumbing the preoccupations of self-obsessed middle-aged folks and quasi-incestuous New England college towns. But her take on the emotional dislocations of the millennial, not just Noah and his friends and foes, but Dowd’s somewhat embittered, somewhat spoiled daughters, is wonderfully excruciating. Clearly, this is an author who remembers her own late adolescence all too well. The result is not just writing that’s good, but writing that’s brave.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Halfway through Rachel Basch’s third novel, The Listener, the reader gets the feeling that the title is ironic. Malcolm Dowd is a psychotherapist at the college in his town. His job is to listen; no doubt his skill at listening has saved the sanity or even the lives of the sad people who unburden themselves in his office. But when it comes to his own loved ones, Malcolm Dowd is about as deaf as a stump.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A room, or a delusion of one’s own?

Review by Arlene McKanic

It’s a glad thing when a reader encounters a character so compelling that you want to punch him in the nose. Such abhorrence—it’s not really hatred—can be as pleasurable in its own way as love. Such is the aggravation caused by Jonas Karlsson’s weird, insufferably arrogant, not quite neuro-normal protagonist in the crisp, novella-length book The Room.

The story takes place in Sweden. The protagonist’s name is Björn. After being quietly fired from one job where he was also intolerable, he takes a job in the open-plan office of some sort of Authority. There, he takes his superiority over everyone for granted. He’s a bully and a misogynist, and we ache for someone to tell him off, if not punch him out. But this is Scandinavia, so there’s none of that. (One wonders what would have happened to Björn if he’d been an office drone in New York. For one thing, there would be no book because something unfortunate and needful would have happened to him by page five.)

Then, Björn discovers a room in a place where no room can be. It’s a plain office with filing cabinets, a desk and such, but only he can see its door and only he can go through it. The reader thinks, “Lovely, he’s not only a toe rag but he’s delusional as well.” But Karlsson’s adroitness as a writer is such that we begin to doubt. Björn experiences this ordinary room in such detail that we begin to wonder whether he might really be telling the truth—after all, Björn’s a piece of misery, but is he crazy? Besides, his timeouts in that room help him excel so much at his job that he comes to believe, sort of rightly, that he can’t be fired.

The Room, a modern, Bartleby-like examination of the tyranny of radical individualism, does mess with one's head, but in a most pleasurable way.

It’s a glad thing when a reader encounters a character so compelling that you want to punch him in the nose. Such abhorrence—it’s not really hatred—can be as pleasurable in its own way as love. Such is the aggravation caused by Jonas Karlsson’s weird, insufferably arrogant, not quite neuro-normal protagonist in the crisp, novella-length book The Room.
Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

The depths of a family’s nightmare

Review by Arlene McKanic

Tim Johnston’s latest novel has an unusual take on the parent’s-worst-nightmare scenario of child abduction. He doesn’t focus so much on the abductee, Caitlin Courtland, but instead on what Caitlin’s disappearance does to the men in her life.

Caitlin is snatched while the family is on vacation in the Rockies; they’re there partially because it’s a great place for Caitlin, a champion high school runner, to train. The disaster shatters the family almost at once, but things were shaky for the Courtlands even before the kidnapping. Dad Grant was unfaithful to his wife, Angela. Dudley adored his older sister, even though she teased him for being fat and unambitious. Still, both he and Grant are guilt-ridden for not being able to protect her.

Johnston’s women are tangential, but not because he’s one of those male writers who can’t write credible women. With the exception of Angela, who falls to pieces and stays that way for pretty much the whole book, the women are fairly strong, intelligent and well-rounded. Caitlin, during the brief time we see her, is a powerhouse. But it’s the men who demand answers; Caitlin’s abduction is an affront to their manhood, even if they never knew her. They speak in bursts of terse but beautifully rendered dialogue and their thoughts are just as circumspect. Johnston’s equally spare, alluring descriptions of the landscape, the weather, geriatric cars and trucks, farm equipment and firearms recall Annie Proulx.

Both suspenseful and sorrowful, Descent explores what it means to be a man—a husband, a father, a brother, a son, an officer of the law—in an uncertain time.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Tim Johnston’s latest novel has an unusual take on the parent’s-worst-nightmare scenario of child abduction. He doesn’t focus so much on the abductee, Caitlin Courtland, but instead on what Caitlin’s disappearance does to the men in her life.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Parisian intrigue + a British ingenue

Review by Arlene McKanic

British-born Maud Heighton, the protagonist of Imogen Robertson’s latest page-turner, The Paris Winter, couldn’t have picked a worse time to come study painting at Academie Lafond. It’s the winter of 1909-1910, when the Seine overflowed its banks, flooding people out of their homes and sucking away the very ground beneath their feet. Perhaps Maud had some idea that she would be a starving artist for a few weeks before she sold her first painting and made a big splash at the Salon, but she had no idea what she was in for. She’s broke, starving, freezing and probably on the verge of a deathly illness.

Fortunately for Maud, her rather desperate situation is noticed and she’s sent to be the companion for a young woman named Sylvie Morel, who lives with her brother. Now, Maud has a warm bed to sleep in and some decent food to eat. The Morels are kind to her. Everything goes well, until, of course, it doesn’t. The bad stuff includes but isn’t limited to gaslighting, attempted murder and an ingenious jewel heist that almost works. It all engenders in Maud a lust for vengeance that recalls Greek tragedy. The phrase “revenge is a dish best served cold” seems not to have occurred to her. But will it be a tragedy for her, or a tragedy for the people who betrayed her?

Robertson is skillful at conjuring up not only a twisty, gripping plot, but also compelling characters. There’s the upright, intelligent and ambitious Maud and her wealthy, compassionate fellow artist Tatiana, who’s in Paris with two fussy aunts who want her to marry some rich Russian dolt against her will. There’s the earthy life model Yvette, neurasthenic Sylvie and an American-born Countess who’s no better than she ought to be. These multidimensional characters and Robertson’s descriptions of Belle Epoque Paris—even of rats in ancient, flooding cellars—make the reader want to visit, even for a day.

British-born Maud Heighton, the protagonist of Imogen Robertson’s latest page-turner, The Paris Winter, couldn’t have picked a worse time to come study painting at Academie Lafond. It’s the winter of 1909-1910, when the Seine overflowed its banks, flooding people out of their homes and sucking away the very ground beneath their feet.
Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspensePopular Fiction

A sinister pact

Review by Arlene McKanic

Stephen King is really good at acknowledging the human grief that underlies so much horror, and how that grief can twist a person into something monstrous—Pet Sematary, anyone? This is one of the themes of his new hair-raiser, Revival.

King brings the dread early. The novel begins with the shadow of a man falling over a little boy playing with his toy soldiers in 1962. The little boy is Jamie Morton; the man is the new preacher in his town, Charles Jacobs. The way King describes the meeting makes you want to stop reading right there because you know something ghastly is going to happen.

The only thing is, it doesn’t.

The new reverend is very young, but he’s a delightful man who befriends Jamie and his perfectly normal, loving family. He has a beautiful wife and an adorable little boy. He’s a bit obsessed with electricity, but hey, everyone has a hobby.

Then, something horrifying does happen. It’s in no way supernatural and no, it doesn’t involve the good reverend interfering with little Jamie. But it is horrific, unforeseen and nobody’s fault. The repercussions will affect thousands of people and persist for decades—at the end Jamie is middle-aged and Jacobs is elderly and ailing.

Between the tragedy and where it leads, life stumbles on with its big and little crises. The reader may wonder at some points if this is a novel where a character has to cope with gruesome but ordinary misfortune, à la Dolores Claiborne. But no, underneath it all, behind it all, nothing is remotely ordinary.

Don’t do what this reviewer did and read the last pages of Revival in the middle of the night in a house way out in the woods. Once again, King proves that he’s not a squillionaire best-selling horror author for nothing.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Stephen King is really good at acknowledging the human grief that underlies so much horror, and how that grief can twist a person into something monstrous—Pet Sematary, anyone? This is one of the themes of his new hair-raiser, Revival.
FictionSuspense

Can a precocious teen end the Cold War?

Review by Arlene McKanic

The first thing you may think when reading the opening pages of Stephen L. Carter’s engrossing Back Channel is, “What in the devil is going on here?” It’s 1962 and we’re at the beginning of the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy is in a townhouse with a 19-year-old African-American girl, but not for the reason you think. It seems that this young lady is the key to stopping the world from becoming a glowing, radioactive ember in the darkness of space. You can’t be blamed if your first reaction is bemusement.

But even before this assignation, the young lady, Margo Evans, is sent to Bulgaria to babysit a real historical figure—you would never in a million years guess who it is. (Don’t worry, it isn’t Comrade Khrushchev.) Now, on top of your bemusement, you have to wonder, “Were things during the Cold War that desperate?” Anyway, Margo’s fractious charge has been approached by some Russian muckety-muck who may or may not tell him just what’s in all those crates the Soviets are shipping to Cuba. Her task is to get him to tell her so she can tell her handlers, or something like that.

But when the charge refuses to show up for a meeting because of obsessions he finds more pressing, Margo goes in his place. The experience proves traumatic, but then, to paraphrase one character, “Things get funny.”

If that’s not enough to keep you hooked, Carter surrounds Margo with people who are decidedly not nice and situations that are beyond surreal. Watching Margo navigate among so many landsharks, including our charming horndog of a POTUS, is fascinating in its own right.

Then, there’s Margo herself. Brilliant, logical, ambitious, patriotic in her own way, somewhat chilly in demeanor, she may remind you of a young Condoleeza Rice. But it’s her vulnerability, ultimately, that fascinates. She’s a girl, she’s an orphan, she’s a virgin, she doesn’t quite know what she’s supposed to do or how she’s supposed to do it. That you’re here to read this review tells you one outcome of her ordeal. For the rest of it, you’ll have to read Carter’s smart and snappy page-turner.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The first thing you may think when reading the opening pages of Stephen L. Carter’s engrossing Back Channel is, “What in the devil is going on here?” It’s 1962 and we’re at the beginning of the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy is in a townhouse with a 19-year-old African-American girl, but not for the reason you think. It seems that this young lady is the key to stopping the world from becoming a glowing, radioactive ember in the darkness of space. You can’t be blamed if your first reaction is bemusement.
FictionPopular Fiction

A pair of strange star-crossed lovers

Review by Arlene McKanic

Let’s not mince words: George and Irene are weirdos. George is a teacher of astronomy who has visions of ancient gods and goddesses. Irene is an astrophysicist who discovers tiny, purple black holes and doesn’t believe in love or anything else that can’t be measured with very precise instruments. George, on the other hand, longs for love like a consumptive Victorian heroine. They’re both from Toledo and, according to the powers that be, are supposed to end up together. The question Lydia Netzer’s second novel asks is ‘How?’

One way it’s possible is that Irene isn’t as cold-blooded as she wants to be. The second way it’s possible is that a twist of fate finds the two of them at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy at the same time. The Institute has heard about Irene’s mini-black holes and has hired her. George, meanwhile, is kicked out of his office to accommodate Irene and is in a position to resent her. But when he first lays eyes on Irene, he falls for her, hard. How could he not? It beats getting any more serious with his current date, a woman who spent her formative years speaking bird language with her father.

This might be a good time to mention that George and Irene aren’t the only weirdos in this book. Indeed, the reason they get together in the first place is because of a series of weird events that happened before they were born. It could be said that the culmination of the weirdness was them being born at the same time and in the same place. And none of it was an accident.

Though Netzer’s parade of human oddities can be a bit distracting, the book earns its redemptive turn at the end; there just had to be a logical reason why George had visions of deities crawling around the ceiling and falling off of balconies.

Quirky, well written and insightful, How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky reminds us of the surprises to be found in even the most predetermined circumstances.

Let’s not mince words: George and Irene are weirdos. George is a teacher of astronomy who has visions of ancient gods and goddesses. Irene is an astrophysicist who discovers tiny, purple black holes and doesn’t believe in love or anything else that can’t be measured with very precise instruments. George, on the other hand, longs for love like a consumptive Victorian heroine. They’re both from Toledo and, according to the powers that be, are supposed to end up together. The question Lydia Netzer’s second novel asks is ‘How?’

FictionLiterary Fiction

Light my fire

Review by Arlene McKanic

Someone is setting fire to the houses of Pomeroy, New Hampshire, in Sue Miller’s latest novel, but that’s beside the point. The important thing is that Francesca “Frankie” Rowley has returned from a long sojourn in Africa as an aid worker and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. Besides, the thing that lights her fire is Bud Jacobs, the local newspaper editor whose life is just as up in the air as hers is. The two launch a passionate affair even as everyone else’s summer home is being torched.

But there are other things that concern Frankie, who’s a little, er, burned out from both the futility and tiny, ephemeral triumphs of her work in Africa. She’s moved back in with her parents and neither she nor they know whether the move is permanent. Moreover, her father, who has never been attentive to Frankie, her sister Liz or their mother Sylvia, is sinking into dementia.

Miller’s skill as a writer has always allowed her readers to stick with a story no matter how self-absorbed her characters are. Part of this success is because Miller (Lake Shore Limited, The Senator’s Wife) tends to focus on intelligent women forced to choose between passions and duties that seem irreconcilable. Should Frankie stay near her parents, who need her? Should she stay with Bud? Should she return to Africa, where she can do her best work and where there are no doubt other men waiting?

The Arsonist is a worthy snapshot of the dilemmas faced by certain women of a certain time and how they choose to tackle them.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Someone is setting fire to the houses of Pomeroy, New Hampshire, in Sue Miller’s latest novel, but that’s beside the point. The important thing is that Francesca “Frankie” Rowley has returned from a long sojourn in Africa as an aid worker and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. Besides, the thing that lights her fire is Bud Jacobs, the local newspaper editor whose life is just as up in the air as hers is. The two launch a passionate affair even as everyone else’s summer home is being torched.
FictionDebut Fiction

A friend’s absence stirs up secrets from the past

Review by Arlene McKanic

Literature is replete with unreliable narrators, but you’ve never encountered an unreliable narrator like the one in Emma Healey’s mournful and luminous debut novel, Elizabeth Is Missing. Maud Horsham isn’t remotely evil. She’s not pathologically dishonest, nor does she have some deep, dark secret to hide. Her unreliability comes simply from the fact that she’s elderly and her memory is failing fast. On top of this, she’s absolutely sure that her friend Elizabeth is missing.

Dementia can’t keep Maud from trying to find her missing friend in this vivid debut.

We learn that Elizabeth isn’t exactly missing, at least not in the way that Maud insists that she is. The person who’s missing is Maud’s adored older sister Sukey, and Sukey has been missing since World War II. Maud was a teenager then. Her present-day dementia makes her grief and longing for both women bleed into each other. Her past life is so dominated by Sukey’s disappearance that Maud’s memories of her own happy enough marriage and young motherhood barely register.

Other than this, Maud has lived an ordinary life in an ordinary English suburb. She’s like any other pensioner whose recall is getting dicey. She has a care­giver who drops by. Her daughter and granddaughter also look after her. Her son comes over from Germany to see her when he feels like it.

Maud’s deterioration makes her sympathetic and exasperating by turns—the reader does wish she’d stop shouting and breaking things for no reason, stop getting lost and try to remember what she’s just been told a second ago. But it also makes her sad and a little funny, which she’s aware of. You figure that when she was a younger woman she was kind, plucky and resourceful.

What’s truly astonishing about the book is that its author—a web administrator at the University of East Anglia—isn’t even 30 years old. How can she know what it’s like for a person to lose herself, bit by bit? How can her descriptions of World War II, with all the shabbiness and rationing and black-market intrigue, be so vivid? Of course, Healey is able to imagine and empathize on such a level because she’s simply a brilliant writer. Let’s hope we hear much more from her over the years.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Emma Healey for this book.

Literature is replete with unreliable narrators, but you’ve never encountered an unreliable narrator like the one in Emma Healey’s mournful and luminous debut novel, Elizabeth Is Missing. Maud Horsham isn’t remotely evil. She’s not pathologically dishonest, nor does she have some deep, dark secret to hide. Her unreliability comes simply from the fact that she’s elderly and her memory is failing fast. On top of this, she’s absolutely sure that her friend Elizabeth is missing.

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