Aaahh, we realized the answer. It didn't have the breathless burbs of "Here's your next 'Gone Girl' written all over it......
It had its share of glowing recommendations from authors, but they described it as a heartfelt drama........so, no unreliable narrator........and only one dead body.
The book promised a story of redemption........and full disclosure here, the BQ is a shameless sucker for such tales......
So we plucked it off the shelves, becoming our library's first patron to give it a spin....
Didn't take us long to realize that we didn't belong in this book's demographic.......it fell somewhere in a gray area between angst-ridden Young Adult and Chick-Lit Serious Fiction.......
But we stuck with it for a number of reasons......first, we liked that the prose remained simple, functional and unadorned with any discernible stylings. In other words, a merciful lack of Creative Writing Graduate Student showing off.........
And author Lloyd took to heart that basic lesson pounded into the heads of all fledgling fiction writers......"chase your characters up a tree.....shake a stick at them.....then find a way to get them back down again...."
For Redemption Suckers like us.....how could we resist? The book follows not one, but two parallel gut-punch storylines.......a 19 year old woman piecing together a semblance of an adult life after spending five years in a Juvenile Lockup for the murder of her stepfather.......and the heartbreaking tribulations of her autistic younger brother, kidnapped by his own uncle then abandoned and left with yet another family, a tattoo artist and his young daughter.
That sounds like enough misery to keep "Days Of Our Lives" going for another two years....but to her great credit, Heather Lloyd plows straight ahead with her characters' many troubles and never stops to beg for tears........or waste time with any elaborate metaphors or overheated contemplation.
We didn't even mind that the book neatly wrapped up all these impossibly grim plot threads in a feel-good finale that reads as if ready made for a comforting, soothing film adaptation. (If Garry Marshall were still with us, this might have served as a perfect project for him....)
After returning it, we once again noticed the book back to its lonely vigil on our library's shelf......still searching for readers.....
If you catch sight of it on your library's shelves, sitting there all by its lonesome little self.....we recommend an adoption......if you fall hard for stories like this one, give it a shot......and give the 'Gone Girl' wanna-be's a rest for a while. 3 stars (***)
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