cbr17bingo Rec’d
I was gifted and recommended this book by someone who told me there would be surprises and not all was as it would appear to be. So I started reading it carefully, trying to put together the pieces, but it then started to be clear that I was being misdirected left and right.
We start off with four strangers in the Reading Room of the Boston Public Library, sharing a table and peacefully minding their own business, when there is a sudden scream from the floor above them. A woman is dead and they all must stay in place until interviews have been conducted, etc. The narrator, an Australian would-be writer, has just been musing about her theories of constructing her novel. She’s not much for overall planning, but feels it’s rather like working on a bus.
I’m not totally without direction . . there is a route of some sort, but who hops on and who gets off is determined by a balance of habit and timing and random chance. I feel you, girl.
As of the moment, her three fellow passengers are a young extravagantly tattooed woman who is reading Freud, a young man with an almost cartoon-like Noble Chin who has been staring at the same page of his book for at least ten minutes, and a slightly older extremely handsome man who has typing at full speed on his laptop for a while now. They introduce themselves and chat for a bit and decide to wait in the Map Room Tea Lounge over coffee.
But now we pull back a bit and discover (different font) that Hannah, the writer, is still back in Australia, and has forwarded this beginning bit of her novel to a young man, Fred, who is a Boston resident, for him to review for accuracy.
From here on, we are in a labyrinth of misconstrued plotting and overturned assumptions up until the very end. And I mean the very end. I can’t tell you how many times I read over the last two pages going, “Wait what?” That was fun.