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Wow.
Layered with so many velvety bands of literary texture and nuance, this is an absorbing, mesmerizing, haunting read, leading the reader deep into the hidden lives of two families, — the stories untold, the fears blindly enacted, the words not spoken but festering, for years, and even decades, stultifying all characters held in their clogging masses.
“How can there be so little to say aloud when there is a torrent of words gushing beneath the surface?”
Alternating between two timelines, this is the tale of 1987’s fifteen-year-old Bee (Beatrice) Rowan, her twin brother Gus, and her mother Mary Rowan, living in Austin,Texas. In the same timeline, we enter the world of Leo Nastasi, Gus’s best friend, and his mother Diana, an almost-tenured professor.
Although the two families exist across the street from each other, aside from the relationship between Gus and Leo, they are not at all close. Until the terrible happens — a thirteen-year-old girl, last seen in the field that abuts both houses, disappears, — and the terrifying emotional crises that follows overwhelms them all.
Decades later, the timeline is now 2011, and Bee, married with a new baby, estranged from both her brother Gus and his friend Leo, is struggling. Try as she might, Bee is emotionally disconnected, unreachable — the fallout from decades-old questions and fears rendering intimacy impossible.
As the author slowly and deftly unveils worlds, exquisitely fragile in the tentativeness of their telling, we the reader struggle to put the pieces together. Bordered on all sides by heart-stopping love (mother, sister, lover, friend), ravaged by the wildness of grief, longings and imaginings, and of course, built on secrets, — when all is revealed (no spoilers here) the revelations will be seen to be as tragic as they are illuminating.
A beautifully written, deeply stirring, magnificent read (not to be missed in the opinion of this reader), this is definitely one of 2024’s best.
A great big thank you to #Netgalley, the author and the publisher for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.
