Black-Eyed Susans by Julia Heaberlin

 

So I read another novel by Ms. Heaberlin and it was pretty good, so I grabbed this one while I was at the library, and it's also pretty good. There's a little more of the overcomplication that at least sometimes passes for intelligent plotting than in the other one, more reliance on a narrator with a secret (which borders on unreliable narration, but it's pretty clear up-front that Tessa/Tessie isn't willing to talk about some things, and she's pretty straightforward about everything else). The prose and dialog have occasional nifty turns of phrase, and there's some wit and sparkle around the edges; the story is mostly clear if complex, and the characters manage to establish some decent individuality. The choice to put the story in two timelines is familiar to me, I dunno if it's a thing common in some portions of the Suspense Novel Kingdom, I've seen it in some mediocre-at-best novels but it's also a core feature of all the Laura McHugh novels I've enjoyed. This novel at least seems less inclined to describe the small town at its core as a trap, the way way McHugh's tend to.