See How Small

Starred review from October 27, 2014
Whiting Writers’ Award–winner Blackwood (We Agreed to Meet Just Here) has produced a genre-defying novel of powerful emotion, intrigue, and truth. From the opening pages, which artfully skirt from past to present, it’s clear that an atrocity has befallen Elizabeth, Zadie, and Meredith, the three teenage girls staffing the front counter at Sandra’s ice cream shop. Killers assault the girls, bind them, and set the building on fire. The merciless crime’s aftermath, affecting everyone in the Texas town—including devastated, revenge-consumed mother Kate, town firefighter Jack, and the arsonists themselves—forms the core of the story as each character’s life is detailed through the 60 brief, vividly realized chapters. As anniversaries of the murders pass, Blackwood resurrects the three young women on a ghostly plane. They populate Kate’s dreams, hang around town, and appear to the eccentric Hollis Finger, who may hold the key to solving the crime. Reminiscent of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and based on a similar, still-unsolved 1991 case in Austin, Tex., Blackwood explores the effects of senseless crime on an innocent, tightly knit community, using deft prose to mine the essence of human grief and compassion.

November 1, 2014
The grisly deaths of three girls radiate across a community, which becomes as fragmented as this novel's impressionistic prose."The men with guns did things to us." The second novel by Blackwood (We Agreed To Meet Just Here, 2009, etc.) opens with a harrowing collective invocation by a trio of teenage girls working in an Austin ice cream shop, two of them sisters, who in a robbery, were bound and gagged with their underwear, then killed when the shop was burned down. In brief chapters thick with fire and ghost imagery, Blackwood alternates among a handful of men and women affected by the tragedy: Kate, the mother of two of the girls; Jack, a firefighter who entered the carnage; Hollis, an Iraq vet and witness; Rosa, a reporter; and Michael, the getaway driver for the killers. A more conventional novel might apply a worlds-in-collision template to these characters, emphasizing their shared experience. But Blackwood's style is much more slippery, and his characters' struggles are more particular and isolated. Michael's grip on reality slackens as his drug use increases and he struggles to keep custody of his daughter, while Hollis finds his PTSD triggers resurgent, and Kate cycles through relationships. The connective thread among them isn't so much the tragedy as the dour, vaguely symbolic experiences they have, from the portentous utterances of Michael's grandmother-in-law ("Are you from the planet of men?") to interludes in the voices of the dead girls themselves. The novel is strikingly creepy, if a bit affected-the brevity of the chapters and gauzy prose have a lyrical effect but also make the story feel diffuse, with no one peculiar, uncanny moment given the chance to build up a head of steam. Blackwood is an excellent stylist, though in the name of unconventionality, the reader lacks a few narrative toeholds.

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October 1, 2014
In a story line based on an actual event, three teenage girls (two sisters and their friend) are brutally murdered and then set on fire in an ice-cream shop in Austin, Texas. The spirits of the dead girls are then able to observe the reactions of various people, including their parents, the fireman who found them, witnesses to the atrocity, and the likely suspects. Everyone suffers in the aftermath: the fireman is haunted by the moment he first observed their charred bodies, one of the mothers completely upends her life but finds no peace, and one of the witnesses, a war veteran suffering from PTSD, has frequent visions of the dead girls. Both sad and dispassionate, the novel has much to say about the mysteries of the human psyche, the far-reaching effects of violence, and the disparate ways grief works on people. Although See How Small bears a certain resemblance to The Lovely Bones (2002), its commercial appeal will be narrower because it's made up of snippets of narrative that jump back and forth in time, all relayed in dreamlike prose and shrouded in ambiguity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2014

Three teenage girls who had been tied up in a small-town Texas ice cream shop that was then set on fire watch over those they've left behind, trying to find ways to help them reconnect with life. A BEA and ALA featured title.

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September 1, 2014

On an ordinary day in Austin, TX, Kate Ulrich's two teenage daughters and their friend are brutally murdered while closing up an ice cream shop. Five years after the still unsolved crime, the three girls are a collective "we"--visiting and observing Kate, their other parents, the man who found them, and witnesses. The stories of the victims and the traumatized survivors are told in nonlinear, dreamlike snatches--memories surfacing or vignettes from past and present. The girls float in and out of focus for the reader and the survivors, unable to break through the very thin barrier separating the living and the dead. The characters are compellingly troubled, but frequent shifts in perspective remind readers how little one can actually know about another person, whether they have a tragically short lifetime or not. VERDICT Similar on the surface to Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, this lyrical, abstract, and less sentimental novel by Blackwood (We Agreed to Meet Just Here; In the Shadow of Our House) about murdered teenage girls observing the living will probably not appeal to as wide an audience but may haunt literary fiction readers long after the unsettling ending. [One of Barbara Hoffert's "Writers To Watch," Prepub Alert, 7/14/14.]--Laurie Cavanaugh, Holmes P.L., Halifax, MA

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