The Promised World by Lisa Tucker

Packing an emotional wallop in fiction writing can be achieved in a variety of ways, from the meat-headed (have a character strangle a kitten), to the artful (see most Henry James or Edith Wharton novels for examples of pained yearning). It helps to set up a premise that immediately puts the reader on unsteady ground, whether they’re unsure at the outset where they are (literally or figuratively) and what has occurred before the opening page, or, if there’s an initial event that drives the plot, they don’t know how that’s going to be responded to by the characters.

In The Promised World, Lisa Tucker uses the latter stratagem to draw the reader in. At kick-off, a young man named Billy Cole has committed ‘suicide by police’, leaving behind a wife, Ashley, and three young children. Just as importantly plot-wise, another of the bereaved is his twin, Lila, with whom he was extremely close, maybe even unnaturally so, as one character darkly insinuates.

Lila has a spouse herself, Patrick, but the couple has no children. Lila is an American literature scholar who has been completely devoted to her career, and though her husband would dearly love to become a father, his adoration of his wife is such that her wishes are paramount. Billy’s death hits Lila like a tanker, and she starts to withdraw into herself and her memories of her shared past with Billy. But the memories prove to be more tenuous than they should be, and chunks of her life seem to be missing.

As Lila starts to lose her sanity and a desperate Patrick tries to help, we discover there is much Lila and Billy haven’t told their loved ones about where they came from. The pair always said their parents are dead, for example, but on further investigation Patrick encounters some apparently murky reasons why Lila has always been reticent about discussing her childhood.

Meanwhile, Ashley copes with Billy’s absence by moving in a new boyfriend only a couple of weeks after his death, which precipitates some drastic action on the part of his two older children. This is what brings the novel to its climax and forces Lila to confront what she’s been running from throughout her adult life.

Tucker has used a clever device in this book: she’s told the story in the third-person, but changes the perspective around between main characters including Lila, Patrick, Ashley and Billy’s son, William, through alternating chapters. This allows her to reveal the plot from multiple points of view, an ideal way – when done well and even-handedly, as it is here – to reveal each character’s fears, insecurities and motives for action. It also facilitates the development of a key theme of the book, personal history as it relates to memory and shared experience.

This way, we learn about the nature of Billy and Ashley’s marriage as Ashley reflects on her past and deals with her children’s grief; we see Lila slowly melt down as she struggles with her mental health and her distrust of her own memory; and we find out how some characters, particularly the long-suffering Patrick, cope with the holding of secrets by those they love most.

The Promised World is at heart a family drama, but there are elements that are highly suspenseful and rather thriller-like. There’s nothing predictable or formulaic about it, and the story is tidily resolved by the final page.

2.5/5 Stars- Makes for a pleasing, absorbing weekend read, and it would be a chat-provoking choice for book clubs.  Click here to listen to the Easy Mix Audio review.

Tags: Alexander Communications, Book Review, Easy Mix, Easy Mix Reviews, Lisa Tucker, Stephanie Jones, The Promised World

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Parsing the Page (Steph's book blog). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.