Offered Books:
Lies She Told by Cate Holahan
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
Sourdough by Robin Sloan
Emma in the Night by Wendy Walker
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Selected:
Emma in the Night by Wendy Walker
Others Purchased:
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
Wendy Walker's Emma in the Night follows Cass, the sister of the titular Emma, as she returns home three years after both disappeared. Told through a split perspective (Cass's and Dr. Abby Winters, a forensic psychiatrist), the reader is slowly shown snippets of what happened, while also being given allusions to a greater event also occurring.
This is a great novel. I could try to tease it out, but this is a solid story with great characters that keeps you on the edge of your seat the entire time you are reading it. I could barely put it down - each chapter end made me want to continue, without resorting to cheap cliffhangers that so many other novels of this nature do.
Solid characterizations abound, which must have been hard for Walker to do with the story told from the perspective of only two characters. Walker also does a great job of making the reader question the reliability of her narrators without going to far and making them out distrust what they are reading.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves a good mystery.
4.5 out of 5
This ended up being an excellent month of selections, as I could say just as many nice things about Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere as I could Emma in the Night, despite them being two drastically different novels.
Set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the novel follows various members of two families: the affluent Richardsons and their renters, the Warrens. While the meat of the novel focuses on the interactions between the various members of the two families, there is also a background-but-not-really plot focusing on the adoption of a baby and the reappearance of the birth mother that adds a bittersweet richness to the story.
Ng does a great job of making the day-to-day life of both families interesting without stretching the realism of their realities. She really delves into the characters when she focuses on them, but doesn't neglect to build any of the side characters, which only deepens the plot. One gets the feeling that Ng could've written a second novel focusing on these characters without repeating much of what she had already written.
Again, I cannot recommend this book enough - it's a great one.
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