Bryn Chancellor

I came very close to abandoning Sycamore by Bryn Chancellor but I stayed the course and eventually this over-written story drew me in and I had to read to the end to find out how the author would gather the various storylines together. The story basically explores the effect that the disappearance of a teenage girl has on a small Arizona town.

In 1991, Jess Winters is a troubled teen, her parents have just divorced, her mother and she have moved to this small town and she is having a hard time adjusting and making friends. To escape her problems she often goes on late-night solo walks around town. One night she doesn’t return from her walk. The story then jumps ahead eighteen years to another newcomer to town who discovers human bones embedded in a desert ravine. While the whole town waits to see if these remains are indeed Jess the story jumps back and forth and we learn the backstory of many of the town’s residents which also helps to explain what happened to Jess.

This is a story that was a little overloaded with secrets, guilt, and failure but the main problem I had was with the overly descriptive writing. Sentences like “The carbonized sky howled as the Milky Way cracked its sternum, exposing its galactic heart.” were rather difficult to swallow. Too bad, because the story was engrossing and the resolution to the complicated narrative was quite well done.… (més)

In 1991, seventeen-year-old Jess Winters went for a walk and never came home. In 2009, a newly arrived resident of town finds human bones in a dry wash. Family and friends who have wondered, hoped, believed for eighteen years will have to face truths about what happened the months, weeks, days leading up to Jess's disappearance and, especially, what happened the last night any of them saw her.

I picked Sycamore because the blurb reminded me of the mesmerizing first season of Broadchurch. But this is a literary novel, not a mystery: "what happened to Jess" isn't really the point of the story. Do not expect to follow the investigation. Instead, expect to "listen in" on the people who knew Jess as they talk about the time they spent with her and the eighteen years they've spent without her, about who the teens grew up to be and how the adults have grown older. The chapters are more like short stories linked by the common theme of Jess's absence, whether they take place before or after her disappearance.

The style is wordier than my preference, but to be fair, I salivate over noir and Hemingway. Still, some of the craft choices here made it impossible for me to lose myself in this book. The third-person literary voice includes a lot of introspective "telling" and sounds the same for every point of view, regardless of the character's gender or age. The chapters/stories include a letter from one estranged character to another as well as two or three first-person monologues and one key scene in the form of a stage script. These chapters feel more like workshop experiments and jarred me out of the story entirely, making me more aware of the form the author was choosing than of the story itself. Having a character describe the scripted scene as too dramatic only reminded me yet again that none of this was real, and that's something I never want to remember while I'm reading.

Three stars because the story premise is a solid one, and the themes of loss and aging and making amends (or finally acknowledging you can't) are timeless and woven together well. But no more than three because the execution tries too hard.… (més)

Sycamore, by Bryn Chancellor, is the type of book that will stay with you for a very long time. The story is as much about life in general as it is about the life of a girl who went missing when she was 17 years old.

This is a mystery in the broad sense of the term. A girl went missing and no one knows what happened to her. That is pretty much by definition a mystery. If you're hoping for a procedural or a story that unfolds in the form of some type of investigation, this is not that book. If, however, you set aside the genre elements of so many mysteries and instead think of this as a mystery such as you find in life then you will be richly rewarded. The mystery does indeed get "solved" by the end, so unlike so many of life's mysteries this does come with an answer.

While there are quite a few characters in the story they quickly get sorted out in your mind and as you skip from 1991 to 2009 and back you begin to get an intimate portrait of small town life and the individual lives of those there. The characters are richly textured and while you may find yourself identifying with one of them in particular you will also likely see shades of yourself in almost every person. By the end I cared about each and every character, even the ones I found least sympathetic. They are, like myself, human and they struggle daily with the dreams and realities of their lives.

I would highly recommend this to all but those who simply like quick breezy reads that require little in the way of empathy or active engagement. I don't mean to imply this novel requires effort to read but rather that it will make you want to engage more closely with the people who inhabit the pages.

Reviewed from a copy made available through Goodreads' First Reads.… (més)