I was hooked from paragraph two, when we are told that protagonist Patch "lay dying in the woodland" which was a little (= massively) misleading because he survives. Nevertheless, I was hooked.
I fell for the will-they-won't-they romance between two kids growing up together in small town America. One-eyed Patch wants to be a pirate. Saint, being raised by her grandmother, wants to be his friend. So when he encounters posh Misty, another kid in their year at school, being abducted, and fights for her, and gets stabbed, and then himself kidnapped and imprisoned in a dark cellar, Saint turns detective to find where he is. But after she rescues him, his head is full of the girl who was in the cellar with him and he can't rest, not even as an adult, until he finds her.
The path of true love never did run smooth.
I gobbled the pages. At times it was very hard to read because I feared something dreadful would happen. I haven't felt so involved in a character since Chris Whitaker's Duchess in We Begin at the End and even Duchess wasn't as heartbreaking. Whitaker put me through the wringer with this book. I couldn't consume it all at once, although I wanted to, because it is 576 pages, but I wanted to. I found it difficult to sleep because I was so worried for fictional characters. Whitaker is a magician.
And afterwards?
The author is a conjurer who misdirected my attention so I didn't focus on the sheer implausibility of the story he is telling. In many ways, this is the cliched small-town America of the cosy movies. Sammy, the town drunk (and art gallery owner and serial adulterer) has a heart of gold and bankrolls Patch on his mission to discover all the lost girls of America and reunite them (or their bodies) with their grieving loved ones. Patch also becomes a bank robber (a sort of pirate) and can't be captured until Saint joins the FBI. A one-night stand makes Patch a parent, a fact he only discovers after serving time. And, most strange, the friendly 'I'll look after everyone' Chief of Police for this little community participates in a miscarriage of justice involving a victim, a friend of his, who refuses to speak on his own behalf and who doesn't tell his best friend a crucial secret until he is on death row. In hindsight, the whole plot is ridiculous but Whitaker is so good at doing what he does that I didn't notice until afterwards.
By the way, Patch doesn't need to become a bank robber because he is such as supremely talented artist that his paintings are in demand with collectors but he refuses to sell them because they are paintings of abducted girls and he'd rather get a criminal record. He scarcely needs to eat or sleep. Everyone adores him.
By the way, Saint is the only law enforcement officer who can make sense of the cryptic messages encoded in what the girl in the cellar, who is incredibly knowledgeable, said to Patch which he has remembered word-for-word and which has enabled him to paint his pictures so they are the very spit of what has been described.
But I loved it.
Part of his technique with which he spun the web that captivated me is to hardly ever tell the reader anything. Instead the narrative is made of fragmentary gnomic sayings which flash like broken diamonds and make the reader struggle to piece together what the hell is going on. It's very clever. The reader never knows what crucial pieces of evidence say. Even after the denouement, it is not possible to be really certain. It is a masterclass in telling a story by what is not said.
And, of course, he makes you fall in love with the characters from the very start.
Selected quotes:
- “He stole only what he needed and not ever what he wanted.” (Ch 8)
- “A girl who looked to books for answers to questions that would never be asked of her.” (Ch 17)
- “Saint wanted to ask what it was like, to lose the thing that defined you. But perhaps she knew: it left you someone else. A stranger you had no choice but to tolerate, and see each day and feel and fear.” (Ch 28)
- “Death when it came was not light or confession, forgiveness or peace or fire. It was that cold piece of time before you were born, that glance into history books that told you the world went on before and would go on again, no matter who was there to witness it.” (Ch 39)
- “At ten years old he realized that people were born whole, and that the bad things peeled layers from the person you once were, thinning compassion and empathy and the ability to construct a future.” (Ch 39)
- “People talk about falling in love like a fall is ever a good thing.” (Ch 40)
- “God is a first call and a last resort, from christening to deathbed. In between is where faith is tested. The mundanity. Anyone can drop to their knees when they're facing crisis, but doing it when everything is steady ...” (Ch 96)
August 2025; 576 pages
It was first published by Orion in 2024.
My paperback edition was issued in 2025.
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