Book review: Sycamore by Bryn Chancellor

Sycamore
By Bryn Chancellor
HarperCollins Canada

Sycamore is an instant classic. It's a whodunnit/coming-of-age/rural Americana novel that breaks your heart and keeps you turning pages.

The story opens with the discovery of human bones in a dry desert ravine in rural Arizona in a town called Sycamore.

Everyone realizes immediately that the bones must belong to Jess Winters, a 17-year-old girl who disappeared 18 years before.

The story bounces back and forth between the time surrounding Winters' disappearance and the present day as her long-suffering mother waits for confirmation that the bones belong to her daughter.

Readers are taken on a journey that includes themes like teenage friendship, forbidden love, broken families and more.

This is a first novel for Bryn Chancellor, who is a teacher at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She previously wrote a story collection called When Are You Coming Home.

Throughout Sycamore, the characters are relatable and accurate -- the relationships ring true in both their joy and their despair. Readers will keep hoping for a different ending for Winters, even as they can see the tragedy about to unfold.

tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Book review: Saints for All Occasions by J. Courtney Sullivan

Saints for All Occasions
By J. Courtney Sullivan
Alfred A. Knopf

I read Saints for All Occasions in a single day.

It's 335 pages and I was shocked and saddened to find I had reached the end.

That says something about the story -- it captured me and I couldn't put it down.

The story starts with a mother getting a phone call in 2009 that her 50-year-old son has died in a car accident.

Next, it backtracks to 1957, when two young girls, Nora and Theresa Flynn, are leaving Ireland to emigrate to the United States. They've grown up on a farm in the west of Ireland, where people are poor and there isn't a lot of hope for the future. They're leaving to find a better life in America; Nora is also to be married to Charlie, her Irish neighbour, who moved to Boston before her.

From there on, the book alternates timelines and switches perspective, from Nora to Theresa and between all four of Nora's grown children.
There are subplots about adoption, homosexuality and Catholicism, but at its heart this is a book about secrets and the love between a mother and her children.

J. Courtney Sullivan also wrote the bestselling novels Commencement, Maine and The Engagements. The Engagements is soon to be made into a movie and was named a Best Book of the Year by Time Magazine and a Washington Post Notable Book for 2011. Sullivan lives in Brooklyn.
This is a beautiful novel that captures late 20th-century Ireland and Boston and reveals how much life has changed in the past 50 years. Sullivan captures perfectly the dynamics of the family and how what we don't know can affect reality.

tracy.sherlock@gmail.com