Sunday, July 9, 2017

Sycamore/ Bryn Chancellor /323 pgs

If you read the back cover of Sycamore, it sounds like a mystery/suspense novel. It's really not. If anything, I would describe this as a character study. A teenage girl goes missing in 1991 and is never found. Fast forward 18 years and bones are found by a person who just moved to town. I'm not really sure why this person was introduced to the story since she really plays no other part except to find the body. And yet we are given a detailed description of her life. And that of every other character in town. I almost gave up on this book a couple of different times because, while the writing is absolutely gorgeous in some places, there is too much of the minutiae of the townspeople's lives. The most glaring example of this is a woman who jokes to herself that she's had twelve lovers in her life and compares them to the twelve apostles. Ok, fair enough. But then she goes on to describe each one in a couple of paragraphs each. This was too much for me and each character who was introduced was like this. I will say that after about halfway through, the book's pace picks up and I was more interested to find out what happened to the missing girl, and yes the mystery is revealed (to the reader at least) at the end. If you like a more literary and in depth style of writing, this book might be perfect for you.

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