This novel was pretty good, but for some reason I expected something completely different going in. Will I ever learn – expectations about any novel are a surefire way to be a disappointed reader. I picked this book up because it was suggested as thriller – and I assumed it would work well as a somewhat spooky novel. It’s not spooky at all! I’d say this is more YA with only a mere hint of thriller, but mostly a coming-of-age novel with slightly heightened stakes.
The plot: It’s the early 1980s, and Libby is the middle child in a family of five children. Her father, an Irish immigrant, has recently passed away, but even while he was alive he was a sometimes-presence in her life. Her mother is often angry and neglectful (if loving), and her five children clearly stress her out. She keeps deep secrets from them, including the identity/existence of her boyfriend (and most likely father of their youngest sibling, an open secret). I often found myself wondering what a book from HER perspective would be like, but I digress. Libby is 14, and her oldest sister Marie is taking her cool ass out of this small town on a mountain Pennsylvania later that summer, leaving Libby to look after her younger sisters on her own. Her older brother Thomas is unlikely to be of much help in caring for his siblings – he’s another character that the book describes sparingly. We know that he’s smart and bookish, and rarely up for engaging in his sisters shenanigans except when he is.
On the first night of summer vacation, Ellen, Libby’s 12 year old sister, cannot contain her disappointment that her summer will likely not include the art camp that she longs for. Her teachers see promise within her, but her mother pretty much refuses to support her kids in almost any way, with the exception of her youngest, Beatrice (the suspected love-child of her secret boyfriend). Ellen does what 12 year olds do best – she brings up the topic that she knows will cut her mother deep, and the mother responds by stopping the car, near full dark, and demanding that her daughter get out and walk the rest of the way home.
That’s basically what I knew about the book before I read it – that a child is forced out of her family’s car, and then SOMETHING happens that changes the course of events, and the novel was billed as a “thriller” so – you tell me where your mind might go, what sort of book you might expect to read after that.
I’m not going to SPOIL the book necessarily going forward, but I think you might have enough information at this point to know whether or not you’d like to read the book. It would help to know that it IS NOT exactly a thriller, but there are some suspenseful elements. If you’d like a little MORE information, feel free to read on – because I’d like to share just a bit more, in case you would like to know what sort of things ARE in the book.
First, it’s not a book where a child dies. That feels important to note. Everybody lives, and while they live through things that are traumatic this isn’t the story of a child who endures an assault. It’s not a mystery – we know pretty early on what happened to Ellen and who did it. There are character’s whose motivations are pretty inexplicable, but it’s not really mysterious at all. It’s not very atmospheric or spooky, but it is earnest and a page-turner. Also of note is how frustrating Libby can be as a character – her decisions often baffled me. I know she’s just a teenager, and she’s responding with her limited information – but I found myself cringing through certain parts of the book. The book also has a subplot involving several character’s affairs with married people that felt sort of stuffed in. Overall I really wondered about many of the adults in this community – what were their motivations? What was her father’s life like, before his untimely death? How did it feel for these parents, exhausted with their five children, to decide to live the way that they did – with a father in and out of the house, but still very much a part of his children’s lives? Libby’s best friend makes allusions to how unhappy Libby’s mother must have been with her father – but that is never explored.