Play Dead by Harlan Coben

It is rather curious that Harlan Coben opens Play Dead, a 20^th-anniversary reissue of the first of his mystery thrillers, with an introduction that hints at its unreadability. Is he being falsely modest? Self-deprecating? Or trying, in kindness and good faith, to guide the reader towards one of his later, better-constructed works?

That he is telling the truth in stating that he did not make any rewrites is clear. Play Dead is laden with cliché and soap opera-like interior monologues, creating a congestion that takes the book to an excessive 500-plus pages. Although these problems automatically relegate it to the thriller D-list, with adjusted expectations it is worth ploughing on for the pay-off.

What of the plot? We meet Laura Ayars, a preternaturally beautiful former model who now runs a successful business, and David Baskin, a basketball superstar who plays for the Boston Celtics, on their honeymoon in Australia. Madly in love, they have eloped after a whirlwind courtship and are unaccompanied by any relatives or friends.

The marriage is only days old when David heads out for an ocean swim – and fails to return. When a night has passed and there is no sign of him, a panicked Laura calls TC, a Boston police detective and David’s best friend, for help. TC gets on the next plane, but his best efforts fail. David remains missing, presumed drowned.

From here, the plot doesn’t so much thicken as veer wildly. Between an opening prologue involving an unidentified murder 29 years before David’s disappearance; brief passages depicting a unnamed character’s recovery from extensive cosmetic surgery; the apparently groundless resistance to the marriage by each spouse’s parents; and the emergence of a new basketball star with a game uncannily similar to David’s, the experience of reading Play Dead is like bumbling your way along a dangerously unkempt garden path. You know where you’re going, but getting there is a frustrating task.

I don’t want to be unduly harsh towards Coben: Play Dead indisputably shows the promise that he has since fulfilled, and for all the laboured unctuousness of the exposition he has evidently taken care with the plotting. The twist in the tale for which he is known is present here.

There are little delights to savour. The extraordinary obtuseness of one of his main characters, who can most charitably be described as as dumb as a bag of hammers, eventually stops being annoying and instead enhances the daffiness of the entire enterprise.

That, in the end, should be the expectation for what you might get from an afternoon with Play Dead – a residual sense of charming battiness. There are some ugly scenes and nasty people, but also firm friendships and true love of the candyfloss-and-paper-hearts variety. It’s worth reading for the schlock factor, and for the reminder that all good genre writers have to start somewhere, and a lot more skill and effort goes into creating a well-written thriller than the writers would have us know.

(If Play Dead leaves you with a weird filminess on the roof of your skull, wash it away with the sharpness of Caught, Coben’s 2010 thriller involving social media and missing children. It features every virtue and none of the flaws of his debut.)

 1 / 5 Stars: Days of Our Lives on crack.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

The Killing Place by Tess Gerritsen

The titular ‘place’ of Tess Gerritsen’s pacy new thriller is stumbled upon by a hapless group of holidaymakers after, as befits a crime-driven novel in which suspense must be ramped up quickly and the pitch maintained, they suffer irreparable vehicular damage in just the fifth chapter.

Among those on board is Dr Maura Isles, a beloved recurrent Gerritsen character who has, against her better judgement, accepted the invitation of a weekend excursion to a ski lodge from a former classmate she has run into at a medical conference in Wyoming.

Now, in a snowstorm, the stranded quintet trudges along a lonely back-road looking for the slightest sign of civilization, and thinks it has found it in the form of a village bearing the sign KINGDOM COME. But the village is preceded by a two-mile long road, at the top of which is another sign – Private Road / Residents Only / Area Patrolled – suggesting that the Kingdom Come residents might not be warm and welcoming.

But needs must, and the book’s foreboding tone, set by the initial car accident in severe conditions, deepens further as the travellers arrive at a completely abandoned settlement. The garages hold cars, tables are set with plated food, windows are open and cupboards fully stocked. But where are the people? Why is the frozen body of a dog lying under a dusting of snow outside one house? And in another dwelling, where did the puddle of blood at the base of the stairs come from?

Back in Boston, where Maura lives, the apparent vanishing of the doctor prompts her friend, Detective Jane Rizzoli, to up sticks and head to Wyoming to assist the search team looking for the missing group. As the searchers work their way towards Kingdom Come, and evidence that the five may be lost for good is discovered, Jane is forced to rely on her instincts and a tight cadre of trusted colleagues as the reliably dysfunctional concept of the ‘religious commune’ hoves into the reader’s view.

Gerritsen’s style is unadorned, as befits the genre: there are few mellifluous descriptive phrases to demand re-reading and admiration. It is her characterization that is a great strength – after seven novels featuring Isles and Rizzoli, she is clearly comfortable with the pair and other than nudging them towards key plot points seems happy to let them take the lead.

They lack all the dimension of the key players of some of Gerritsen’s writerly rivals, but are permitted sufficient introspection and back-story to appeal to the imagination, and after all, an enthusiastic thriller reader only has to care a little for the protagonists to happily join their adventure.

Meanwhile, the sharpness of Gerritsen’s content can be attributed to her training as a medical doctor, and she has long balanced her practice with writing, logically producing (among the odd excursion into romantic suspense) a handsome back catalogue of medical thrillers in addition to the Isles/Rizzoli series.

In the case of The Killing Place, the end results of the characters’ quest for truth is surprising and unsettling, taking the novel, previously developing within a relatively narrow, personal frame, into the realm of the political and industrial. Even the most jaded reader will likely be shocked.

3/5 Stars: A solid thriller from a writer unafraid of venturing into the political. Click here to view more Easy Mix book reviews.

Family Album by Penelope Lively

The final page of Penelope Lively’s Family Album describes the rambling Allersmead: ‘A prestigious Victorian family home, set in ¼ acre of garden with mature trees . . . Panelled study with De Morgan tiles to fireplace . . . Seven bedrooms and two bathrooms on the first floor . . . an impressive house of the pre-First World War period, with original stained glass and other period features.”

Allersmead is the dominant character in Lively’s delicate exploration of the fractious Harper family with its four daughters, two sons, parents Charles and Alison, and Ingrid, a Scandinavian au pair who never succeeds in leaving, even after all but one of the children, troubled Paul, have scattered to the four corners.

Perhaps the most telling of the early details the reader learns, as Lively methodically unpicks the family’s history, is that not one of the six adult offspring of Charles and Alison has produced a grandchild. Most are in stable relationships, but at least two, including the peripatetic foreign correspondent Gina, embodies the archetype of the commitment-phobic serial monogamist.

Just as she has declined to replicate her mother’s fecundity, so she has avoided marriage, and in the opening chapter’s visit to Allersmead by Gina and her current boyfriend Philip, we start to see why: Alison, the relentless feeder, is buttressed by Ingrid, who silently moves to fill empty coffee cups waved in her direction, and the eccentric, possibly misanthropic Charles.

But all will be revealed, as the opening of one chapter seems to promise: “The house hears everything. It knows all that has been said, all that has been done. Silent speech hangs in the air, and repeats the words that hang in people’s heads: ‘I am a servant’, ‘I seem to recall that you were pregnant’, ‘Who did you love best?’”

It is a novel of secrets, but whether those secrets are found to be pedestrian, “particularly devastating” (as the dust-jacket blurb pledges), or something else altogether will likely depend on the reader’s own experience. Lively may have drawn inspiration from Tolstoy’s famous line – “Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” – but she doesn’t presume to decide for us which kind of family the Harpers are.

Perhaps most remarkably, she finds the universal in a particularly English family. After all, could there be anyone who doesn’t recognize the father more interested in his work than his children; or the mother with ‘that inexhaustible smile’ and ‘majestic complacency’; or the pre-marital pregnancy that goes unmentioned; or the mysterious absence of a family member, the return of whom coincides with the arrival of an infant?

It is a great achievement on the part of Lively, a Man Booker Prize winner, to bundle up decades of conversation and recollection (each character’s point of view and experience, both now and then, is aired) in an affecting tale that neither demonizes nor canonizes its participants. Allersmead holds its secrets, but it does not bear witness to lies.

3.5/5 Stars: A sprawling manse gives up its ghosts. Click here to view more Easy Mix book reviews.

The Search by Nora Roberts

The Search is the latest output of a woman at the height of her considerable powers, the greatest of which must be her ability to just write. By the criteria of commercial success (400 million books in print) and sheer productivity (The Search is one of six books she will publish this year, in addition to the 165-plus she has written since 1979), Nora Roberts is practically matchless. What’s more, while the likes of hyper-prolific James Patterson are abetted by factories of minions, Roberts appears to do it all by herself.

And what does she do? In this case, tells an erudite and compelling story that is surprisingly neat; it is unusual to find a drama-thriller of nearly 500 pages that could not have done with a little fat trimmed, but in the case of The Search, any downtime in the plot, such as a mid-point visit to a spa retreat by the heroine and her girlfriends, is used to add emotional heft, and is the one of the reasons the book succeeds.

This heroine is Fiona Bristow, and the descriptor is accurate in more than a literary sense. Eight years before the start of the book, she was the only one of a dozen women to escape from the clutches of a serial killer nicknamed the Red Scarf Killer. The offender, George Perry, was eventually incarcerated, but not before taking his revenge on Fiona by murdering her policeman fiance.

Fiona has since retreated to Orcas Island, a remote area in the US northwest. At 29, she lives a quiet life, running a canine rescue centre that tracks dogs to train missing persons, and teaching classes to domestic dog owners on the side. She has a close-knit group of friends and a great bond with and passion for animals, but a subterranean wound festers in her inner life, and with two events – the emergence of an apparent RSK copycat killer, and the arrival of an enigmatic, eligible furniture-maker – the wound is suddenly exposed.

Fiona first encounters the bachelor craftsman, Simon Doyle, when he brings his puppy for training. The pair’s initial mutual distrust, followed by will-they-won’t-they tension, adds a frisson to the first half of the book and pays dividends in the second, as the suspense, both emotional and criminal, is ratcheted up. (On a side note, Roberts does the notoriously tricky literary sex scene rather well.)

Roberts expends substantial creative energy on luring us into Fiona’s world, and when a writer has the skill to make her readers care about her invented populace as much as she does, she must have a similar facility with plotting, or it’s all for nought.

Happily, Roberts has this in spades. That there will be some kind of showdown involving Fiona, Perry and the mystery killer seems likely, and what does happen is both unexpected and immensely satisfying. The Search, peopled as it is with slightly eccentric figures, is absorbing not only for its storyline but also the relationships that form and deepen.

Roberts reportedly does much of her research via the internet due to a great aversion to flying; that she may never have been to Washington or spent time with K-9 squads is undetectable. The level of detail and deftness of touch are to be savoured. In Fiona and her creator, two masters are at work.

4/5 Stars: A classic page-turner, and one for dog-lovers.  Click here to view more Easy Mix book reviews.

Sizzling Sixteen by Janet Evanovich

Stephanie Plum is a bounty hunter in Trenton, New Jersey. She works for her cousin Vinnie at Vincent Plum Bail Bonds, alongside the colourful Lula, whom she describes as “the office file clerk, wheelman, and fashion maven. Lula likes the challenge of fitting her plus-size body into a size 8 poison green spandex miniskirt and leopard-print top . . . [her] skin is milk chocolate, her hair this week is fire-engine red, and her attitude is pure Jersey.”

Lula is on a diet which allows her to eat one of everything: “. . . one pea, one piece of asparagus, one loaf of bread.” And one of each type of doughnut, as a drive-by of a pastry shop reveals. After 48 hours on the diet, she confesses to having gained a couple of pounds, but suspects it’s just water retention.

You might surmise that Lula is the best reason to read this fluffy 16^th installment in Janet Evanovich’s smash-hit Stephanie Plum series, and you’d be right, but that’s not an ungenerous assessment. In fact, Lula embodies the levity, archness and pure fun that explain the success of the series and the fondness constant readers have developed for its recurring co-stars.

In Sizzling Sixteen, the activities of Stephanie, Lula and their office manager Connie are severely curtailed when Vinnie is found to have been taken hostage by a local gangster, Bobby Sunflower, to whom he owes a gambling debt of $786,000.

Normally, the crew could turn to Vinnie’s illicitly wealthy father-in-law, Harry the Hammer, but since Vinnie was picked up by a Sunflower goon while “boffing a Stark Street ‘ho”, in flagrant violation of his marital contract with Harry’s daughter Lucille, Stephanie concludes that Harry is not the person to turn to for a bail-out.

So it falls to Miss Plum and her colleagues to find Vinnie and set him free without any of the good guys taking a bullet – or falling prey to a mobster’s pet alligator. Comprehensive and various assistance is provided by Stephanie’s on-off boyfriend, ‘Trenton’s hottest cop’ Joe Morelli, and (since Morelli and Stephanie are presently in an ‘off’ phase) a second love interest, a former Special Forces agent and now private security operative known only as Ranger, who uncomplainingly replaces each of the high-end vehicles Stephanie wrecks in the course of the rescue mission.

Like Evanovich’s earlier Plum novels, Sizzling Sixteen is characterized by plenty of action, a little gentle raunch and scenes that should be suspenseful but are instead uproariously funny, mostly because Stephanie and her girls refuse to take anything seriously. Their reaction to being confronted by a trio of henchmen who shoot through their office door is to lecture them about the cost of replacement; when a bullet graze’s Lula’s arm, she is specific in her indignation (“That a**hole shot me. Somebody get me a Band-Aid. I’m gonna be real upset if I get blood on this tank top. It was one-of-a-kind at T.J.Maxx. I was lucky to find it.”).

The lack of suspense is no flaw: the point is not what happens in the end, it’s the getting there. It’s like taking a frenetic hayride with the combined casts of The Sopranos and Jersey Shore, with frequent stops for doughnuts and fried chicken, and delivers lightness and elevation on a winter’s day.

3/5 Stars: One for the adventuresome escapist in you.  Click here to view more Easy Mix book reviews.

Broken by Karin Slaughter

My introduction to the scintillating crime scribe Karin Slaughter came last year with the re-release of her 2003 novel A Faint Cold Fear. Like that book, her new work Broken is part of her well-established series set in the fictional Grant County in Slaughter’s native Georgia, where she still lives.

This book, like its predecessors, centres on the crime investigation activities of Will Trent, special agent for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation; Sara Linton, the former Grant County medical examiner who relocated to Atlanta following a personal tragedy; and Lena Adams, a local police detective.

Former books in the series starred Jeffrey Tolliver, Sara’s husband and the chief of police. Jeffrey died in an incident for which Lena bears some responsibility and, four years on, Sara remains desolate and embittered. She has undeniable chemistry with Will, a brilliant detective who was raised in foster homes and battles daily with the triple burden of his childhood memories, severe dyslexia and an emotionally unavailable wife, whom he has loved since boyhood. Lena is similarly tormented and events early in the novel serve only to intensify her anguish.

Clearly, the title refers to Sara, Will and Lena as much as the novel’s plot. It could be argued that in crime writing, there is nothing new under the sun, and rather than try to craft an impossibly ground-breaking storyline, Slaughter focuses the tale on her characters. Thus, the suspense lies as much in how they will resolve their predicaments as in how they will solve the crimes.

Said crimes involve a university student, Alison Spooner, and her boyfriend, Jason Howell. Both are found murdered, with a peculiar wound indicating a common killer. Meanwhile, an intellectually handicapped local man apprehended for the Spooner murder commits suicide in his cell – but the circumstances of his arrest and the timing of his death raise questions about the propriety of the investigating officers’ conduct, and Will is quick to pick at the fabric of the carefully constructed explanations of Lena and her superior.

Slaughter refrains from overt political comment – rarely a sexy feature in a crime drama – but anyone who grew up in a small town in the South, as Slaughter did, and has seen as much of the world as she now has would struggle to remain entirely dispassionate. That one of the victims was a young white woman who worked in a diner owned by an older black man is a matter remarked upon, in less than refined terms, by the book’s most loathsome and pitiful character – who also happens to be Tolliver’s replacement as police chief.

It serves as a gentle reminder that for all the famed politeness and gentility of Southerners, there is a darkness just below the surface, and for the purposes of stimulating, character-driven crime fiction, Grant County is blacker than most.

Like all good modern writers in her genre, she makes a specialty of research, as evidenced by the lengthy list of acknowledgements (including of one of her finest contemporaries, Mo Hayder, and that writer’s recent forays into the murky world of forensic diving).

The topic at the heart of the plot is one target of Slaughter’s exhaustive enquiries and serves, when combined with the cleverness of her characterization, to leave the reader quite rapt.

4 / 5 stars: One of the best reads yet from a crime-fic master. Click here to see more Easy Mix Book reviews.

No Time to Wave Goodbye by Jacquelyn Mitchard

Jacquelyn Mitchard is treading familiar (and familial) ground in her new book No Time to Wave Goodbye. A sequel to her 1996 debut novel The Deep End of the Ocean, which spent 29 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, sold three million copies in its first two years of publication, and was chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club pick, No Time to Wave Goodbye re-enters the life of the Cappadora family 22 years after Beth Cappadora’s three-year-old son Ben was abducted.

The first book depicted Ben’s safe recovery, nine years later, from a home in a nearby neighbourhood, but as Mitchard now reminds us, he did not simply slide back into his place in his biological family. The lasting grief caused by the missing decade abraded the family ties, and Ben returned to live with the man he called dad – who had been genuinely shocked to discover that the boy he called Sam was not the real son of his now-deceased wife, whom he met when she was a solo mum to Ben/Sam.

Over the years, Beth and her husband Pat have battled, not always successfully, to come to terms with having to share their son, call him by another name and treat his ‘father’ with kindness at Cappadora gatherings. Evident fractures remain as the sequel opens and Ben, now a husband and new father, embarks on a new journey, as a documentary maker.

The project he has been working on with his ne’er-do-well brother Vincent and opera-singer sister Kerry is premiering in the tight-knit community in which the Cappadoras live. The opening chapters are alive with tension as Beth, who was not told of the documentary’s subject, watches a series of horribly familiar stories.

As a way of making peace with his past and telling the stories of other families like his own, Ben has found a group of families whose children have vanished in mysterious circumstances, apparently taken by strangers.

Beth’s shock is quickly replaced with pride, and as the documentary starts to gain national attention, the family is drawn closer than it has ever been.

The Cappadoras’ collective bliss reaches its peak at a prestigious awards event at which Ben’s film is recognized, but the same night another abduction occurs and lo, the decades-old nightmare resumes.

What follows is a dramatic shift in genre, excising Beth from much of the rest of the story and pitting Ben and Vincent against the elements in an action-thriller jaunt that I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find was inspired by the writings of Jon Krakauer or even Lee Child.

The story holds together and ends enthusiastically if somewhat implausibly, but it’s hard to laud a novel that makes quite so many demands on the reader’s suspension of disbelief, from the similarities between the past and present kidnappings to the awards event, the rescue effort and the final revelation.

It’s diverting and suspenseful and ultimately somewhat tiring. The Cappadoras are an appealing family of which many more tales could be told, but they might do well to stay at home and rest for a bit.

2.5 / 5 stars: The kids are all right.  Click here to see more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Every Last One by Anna Quindlen

The action in Anna Quindlen’s elegant, moving new novel Every Last One takes its time coming; fully half the novel is dedicated to the delicate unspooling of the daily life of the Latham family: Mary Beth, her husband Glen, and their three teenage children, Ruby and her younger, fraternal twin brothers, Alex and Max.

The leisurely pace is not accidental. The reader must know the characters, be invested in their lives, to feel the full weight of the crucial event. (When the titular phrase ‘every last one’ is uttered, it is a heart-sinking moment.)

Anna Quindlen parses private life with a skill rivalling that of any contemporary writer; one suspects that skill is born as much from keen observation and long practice as natural talent. A former journalist who took up fiction writing full-time in 1995, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her New York Times column ‘Public and Private’, and her impressive ‘Last Word’ column graced the final page of Newsweek magazine for nine years until announcing her semi-retirement in 2009.

Additionally, she has written five earlier novels, all bestsellers, including One True Thing, which earned Meryl Streep an Oscar nomination when produced as a feature film in 1998.

Like Mary Beth, Quindlen has three children and a long marriage, and there is an authenticity and lightness to her writing that suggests it is a product of experience as much as invention. (A reporter’s habit that can’t be entirely abandoned, possibly.)

The Lathams live in a close-knit community in which it seems every child has played in every backyard – but not every bond has endured. Mary Beth was once best friends with Deborah, the mother of Ruby’s boyfriend Kiernan, but long-ago events caused an irreparable breach. Kiernan is spending more and more time at the Lathams’, and appears troubled, but Ruby is pulling away, and Mary Beth resists asking questions, having learned that the best way to find out what is going on in the lives of her children is to remain silent and alert.

Meanwhile, Max is sinking into a torpor from which his mother feels powerless to rescue him; he starts to see a therapist, but, with his mood failing to lift, Mary Beth’s anxiety intensifies. Like many mothers, she is the emotional heart of the family, perhaps subconsciously hoping that in fretting over her children, she is helping to protect them.

Quindlen writes ordinary, middle-class family life well. Mary Beth marvels at her daughter’s self-assured quirkiness while reflecting, with a mix of anguish and relief, on Ruby’s recent skirmish with an eating disorder. She yearns for some of Alex’s self-possession to rub off on his withdrawn brother. And she admires the relaxed approach to parenting of her husband, who tells her she is too involved in their children’s inner lives.

It all turns on a dime one evening, following a New Year’s Eve party at the home of Glen and Mary Beth’s close friends. Mary Beth wakes afterwards with a different life. With this, Quindlen poses questions that go to the heart of our existence: how much can one person survive, and when is it worth it to try? Quindlen’s mastery of the navigation of emotion makes the exploration of these questions a rewarding pastime.

3.5 / 5 stars: Sobering and stunning.  Click here to view more Easy Mix book reviews.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

The unusually breathless introduction by the Hachette publicist, combined with the trouble taken to set up a Facebook page (www.whoisamy.co.nz) made me rather suspect The Passage, the third book by American novelist Justin Cronin, might be not be just your everyday post-apocalyptic science-fiction fantasy doorstopper.

That hunch was borne out: the acknowledgements page of the 765-page tome features a nod to film director Ridley Scott (of Bladerunner, Gladiator and Robin Hood), who knows a good story when he sees one and has already snapped up the movie rights for a reported US$3.75 million.

Smart man. The Passage has ‘summer blockbuster’ written all over it, and what’s more, it is merely the first installment in a trilogy.

The opening sentences indicate the scale of Cronin’s ambition for his story: “Before she became the Girl from Nowhere, the One who Walked I, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years, she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.”

At the start of the book Amy, to all outward observations a normal, healthy six-year-old, is abandoned at a convent by her troubled mother. Taken first under the wing of a caring nun, then a grief-stricken FBI agent, she is present when a killer virus is inadvertently unleashed from a clandestine military facility in Colorado, turning 40 million people into vampirish ‘virals’ and leaving all but a handful of the remaining American populace dead.

The disease is part of a grand, top-secret experiment by the US government in which death-row inmates consent to be used as human guinea pigs in exchange for commutation of their sentence – not such a great deal, as it turns out.

Following the outbreak, after which Amy vanishes, Cronin introduces a group of survivors who wall themselves off in what is now the California Republic. A tight but necessarily merciless community of refugees from other parts of the country, they ward off the virals with high-octane lights and skilled combatants known as Watchers.

A breach of security, and the curious reappearance of Amy, only a handful of years older despite the passing of nine decades, drives them eastwards and into the sinister embrace of another group of survivors, who have developed quite a different way of defending themselves against gruesome annihilation.

The question of who else is out there, and whether it is worth taking the substantial risk associated with finding out, dominates the second half of the book. Can a post-apocalyptic world sustain any hope?

The Passage, an immensely brave and inventive novel that is justifiably earning Cronin comparison with the best work of Stephen King, spans a century after the release of the virus. This event occurs in a time not far from now; a world in which, perhaps fittingly, Jenna Bush is Governor of Texas.

The main story is interspersed with brief diary excerpts by some characters, which have been presented at the Third Global Conference on the North American Quarantine Period in the Indo-Australian Republic in April 1003 AV (after virus?).

The excerpts constitute the end of the story, but The Passage leaves us (and Amy) with 900 years to go – one can only hope that the rest of the tale proves as thrilling and transporting as the opening salvo.

4 / 5 stars: An irresistible genre mash-up that reinvents the vampire.  Click here for more Easy Mix Book reviews.

My Name is Memory by Ann Brashares

The rather lovely notion of enduring passion across many lifetimes is at the centre of My Name is Memory, the seventh novel by Ann Brashares, perhaps best-known as the author of the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants series for young adults. 

This new book is her second in the adult fiction genre, after 2007’s The Last Summer (of You and Me), and, clearly emboldened by her earlier successful renderings of the torment and complexity of teenagehood, she introduces her two main characters, Daniel and Lucy, as they experience a profound connection that comes to a climax at a high school ball.

The encounter, as fleeting as it is dramatic, leaves both Lucy and the reader baffled: who is Daniel and where did he come from? Why does he insist on calling Lucy ‘Sophia’? How can she be so drawn to someone she doesn’t even know?

Answers start to emerge in the following chapter, when the action jumps from present-day United States to North Africa in 541, and the tense from the third person to the first, with the narrator musing: “I was first born to the north of the city that was then called Antioch . . . I consider it my first life . . . I guess it’s possible that I’ve lived lives before that.”

This faltering voice belongs to Daniel, who has lived dozens of lives in succession and can remember them all. (The possibility that reincarnation is very common and that only the individual’s awareness of it is unusual is alluded to by Brashares but regrettably not fully explored.)

It is in this first life that he meets Lucy, then a nameless young girl who disappears inside a burning house that Daniel has torched in battle. Tormented, he searches for her down the centuries, finding her, in different women, in 700s Asia Minor and in England in the shadow of World War I. But how to engage Lucy’s memory of Daniel’s role in her previous lives, and what – or who – will intervene to thwart their love?

Aspects of My Name is Memory are reminiscent of Geraldine Brooks’ remarkable 2008 novel People of the Book, which tracked not a love affair but the journey of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book, through centuries of European unrest.

Brashares’ tale, hinging as it does on character rather than setting, is neither as well-researched nor as meticulously detailed as Brooks’, but both writers have a knack for moving swiftly through time and from place to place without discombobulating the reader. Considering Brashares’ action can leap from 2006 Virginia to the coast of Crete in 899 in the course of two chapters, it’s an admirable feat.

That said, if you’ve had any more than a glancing encounter with Audrey Niffenegger’s megaselling The Time Traveller’s Wife, it will occur to you, within a handful of pages, that Brashares is either unabashedly ripping Niffenegger off or out to prove she can do it better.

For this and other reasons – the pure romanticism, the dastardly villain standing in the way of true love – Brashares’ storyline will be familiar in a favourite-blanket sort of way. It’s nothing out of the comfort zone, but good to spend some time with – and proves a surprisingly tender read that is best undertaken in a minimum of sittings. 

3 / 5 stars: The seven ages of man’s yearning.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.