Aaaanyway...
Let me tell you how I am spending said first Friday:
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| botm! |
My excuse tonight was that tomorrow is going to be a long day, and I was fine flying under the radar tonight. My days of two-in-a-row are rare, and besides, I'm committing to Whole30 so my options while I'm out are limited.
AAAAND, I have lots and lots of anticipated reads on which to catch up!
I finally started The Blinds (Adam Sternbergh), after flying through The Chalk Man (CJ Tudor).
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| the chalk man | cj tudor |
If you haven't read this, and have an interest in doing so BEFORE I spoil the whole thing for you, this would be a good time for me to do the initial sign off for you. See you tomorrow ;)
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Still with me?
Last warning: Spoilers Ahead :)
Ok so I got this book through BOTM. I have a friend who has the unfortunate monthly task of blindly selecting which book I have them send, but he got a break this time around when the list came out and I read the first line of the synopsis: "If you're a fan of Stranger Things,...."
Say no more: Selected. I intentionally avoided all the GoodReads reviews, although I was itching to dig into why this book has an average rating of 4.5 stars, with over 10k reviews across a couple different sites. Now I see why.
FIRST: I have a really hard time acknowledging that this is C.J. Tudor's debut book. If you didn't know that, it'd be easy to assume she's had at least a couple under her belt. She has - in my opinion - an excellent grasp on prose, character development, plot twists and ability to convey something truly gruesome without emptying a well of gory descriptives.
"The girl's head rested on a small pile of orange-and-brown leaves."^ The first line of the first page. Read on? YES, I think I will!
This is a book with five core characters: Eddie, Gav, Nikki, Hoppo & Mike - a set of friends who share a rupturing experience from their adolescence together. It toggles back and forth between the then (1986) and the now (2016), and fills in the gaps along the way. The book itself opens up with the event around which the rest of the book seems to revolve.
1986: Tudor paints a picture that is so easy to feel: Five kids living life in the prime of the 80's - riding bikes, meeting at the playground, hanging out at the local small-town hotspots and being blissfully unassuming about what life in the long run might look like. And then there's an accident, followed by a morbid discovery, and things get progressively weird after that.
2016: We fast forward to Eddie - who is now Ed - who is now a middle-aged teacher residing in the same house in which he grew up. He's constantly haunted by and continually processing the past and the people in it. And as Tudor writes it, it feels.so.relatable.
Back and forth between 1986 and 2016, we learn that the title is derived from the chalk man drawings that, in their childhood, were a form of communication between the friends, and in their adult lives, seem to keep appearing as haunting messages and warnings.
1986, when the kids go to the fair and the accident leaves a girl half maimed: missing her leg and half her face. Enter in Mr. Halloran, the albino teacher with strange tendencies and awareness, to whom Eddie seems to gravitate throughout the early part of his story (not the story). Then later in that same year to the final discovery of the body in the woods, and a series of other events: abuse, false allegations and secrets that highlight the nature in which skeletons from the most unlikely closets are revealed on the stages of small community towns. The kids start to disband - a timeline that is steadily unraveled throughout the book, quite consistently and clearly, even through the pattern of time toggling.
2016: Back to Eddie as an adult. He's got a housemate, Chloe, who Tudor paints for us as a wayfaring girl with sharp edges, alternative haircut and a seemingly soft spot for Eddie. They have a platonic relationship as co-inhabitants, despite the age and social gaps between them. Chloe, we learn, has an ulterior agenda all her own, which unsurprisingly ties her together with Eddie and his past, but surprisingly not in the way I would've expected. Again, Tudor with a plot twist win. The characters from Eddie's past resurface in their respective adult forms: Hoppo & Gav, Nikki, Mike. We find out Gav is in a wheelchair. Nikki has disowned her father. Mike... well, Mike's story ends in the same way his brother's did much earlier in the story.
By the end of this book, I had that weird sense of tingly achievement - the one where you've figured it out and feel like you should've seen it all coming before you got to the last sentence. Really, I did nothing but read through what Tudor laid out, but dangit, I wanted more. I wanted to immediately hand the book to the closest human to me and demand they READ IT NOW.
Character & plot development: Thank heavens for the absence of static characters and story line. Literally there's nothing worse for me than a set of stagnant character who learn zilch and do nothing but exist for 3-400+ pages in a plot that doesn't go anywhere.
Prose, construction, composition: I'm pretty sure that when I try to do this, it looks like the plot from Memento, but like, drunk. Seriously. I've never used the word toggling more in one blog entry, but that's exactly what Tudor's done with this, and she does it with a precision that I kindasortadefinitely envy.
Overall: 100% I recommend this book. It's in the Thriller/Mystery genre, and while I don't know how much I'd call it a relative of Stranger Things, it is certainly strange, suspenseful and capturing. It's a quickish read, at 352 pages and relatively short, easy-to-conquer individual chapters.
Oh, and here's C.J. Tudor talking about the book, if you're into that :)
Prose, construction, composition: I'm pretty sure that when I try to do this, it looks like the plot from Memento, but like, drunk. Seriously. I've never used the word toggling more in one blog entry, but that's exactly what Tudor's done with this, and she does it with a precision that I kindasortadefinitely envy.
Overall: 100% I recommend this book. It's in the Thriller/Mystery genre, and while I don't know how much I'd call it a relative of Stranger Things, it is certainly strange, suspenseful and capturing. It's a quickish read, at 352 pages and relatively short, easy-to-conquer individual chapters.
Oh, and here's C.J. Tudor talking about the book, if you're into that :)
And there ya have it! My Friday night, as a book review. Whew. Now I remember why I don't do reviews often.. haha.
I'm on a war path to find some good reads for 2018, so if you're here, if you've made it this far, feel free to leave a suggestion of something you loved in 2017 (or beyond!) that I can add to that list.
For now, I'm off to dig into this Sternbergh read. Maybe I'll review that, too... later. ;)
Happy weekend, blogbots!
xo | cms
