Karen Brown
Lust. The instinct to reproduce.
It’s our most primal urge (besides hunger). In this novel, Karen Brown
meditates on the suffering that goes along with love and lust. This is Brown’s debut
as a novelist, but Publishers Weekly
named her short story collection Little Sinners and Other Stories as a Best Book of 2012.
Set in an middle-class suburb
near Hartford, Connecticut, The Longings
of Wayward Girls is a psychological novel. The main character, Sadie
Watkins, is a thirty-six-year-old stay-at-home mother of two, and she’s
grieving her recent miscarriage. In her undone state of mind, she starts an
affair with a new neighbour, Ray Filley, a man she’d last seen twenty-four years
ago. She senses that something unseemly happened between her mother and Ray when
he was a teenager, and that hunch leads Sadie on a journey toward the painful
truths hidden in her fuzzy memories of the summer of 1979, the year she turned
thirteen. Sadie calls it “that summer,” when everything changed.
Brown’s powerful technique
mesmerized me. First, mirroring the rift in Sadie’s memory, the chapters flip
back and forth between 1979 and 2003 (the story’s current time). That structure
is a hypnotic device; it drew me into Sadie’s world, in which the past often
seems indistinguishable from the present. I got the eerie, dreamlike feeling
that the past was living itself over again. Second, beyond its psychological
effects, the novel excels at description. Heat, thunderstorms, humidity,
children’s dirty feet, birds, and insects (especially cicadas)—Brown describes
these things in a way that transported me to the essence of a New England
summer.
This is a haunting tale, one that
will enchant lovers of psychological suspense.
Bob Young's short stories have been published in
the literary journals Other Voices, Postscripts to Darkness, and Great
Lakes Review. Visit his website: robertbyoung.blogspot.ca.
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