Author: Lisa Unger ISBN: 978 0 307 46520 7
Published: Crown
Date: 2012
Book quote:
Book quote:
“Sticks and stones can break my bones.
But words can break my heart.”
Lisa Unger’s 6th
novel showcases her mastery of the art of creating sticky-finger books (that’s
what I call the unputdownables). If you’ve got a deadline to meet in the next
couple of days, don’t start on this just yet, or you’ll be in trouble.
Heartbroken centres on Heart Island in the Adirondack
islands, along with its mysteries and the people drawn to it. Birdie, the owner
of the island who has been coming there every summer of her life, guards it and
its secrets with a jealous, ugly passion that’s only too believable. Kate, whose
existence is finally taking a discernible shape long after anyone expected her
to do anything with her life, comes to Heart Island and undergoes a peculiar,
forty-something coming-of-age transformation. Finally, the tiny, malleable Emily
finds herself coerced into a horrific spiral of misdeeds and, on the run from
the police, also ends up at the island. Here the past and the present fuse in a
cataclysmic, purging denouement after which none of the protagonists’ lives
will ever been the same again.
What makes for the
tension? Why is it a ‘sticky-finger’ book? Several reasons. Firstly, and
probably most importantly, the character portrayal is totally believable,
certainly for the female characters. As if often the case with Unger’s writing,
the males lag behind the girls and have nothing of the same 3D weight. Dean is
a stereotype with some embellishments, Brad is a cardboard cut-out villain,
Birdie’s husband Joe barely deigns to utter a word and Kate’s son Brendan doesn’t
get much more of a look-in than to limp occasionally across the stage. Kate’s
husband Sean has more of a solid aura, but he is still only a bit-part. The real
strength is with the women. The bitchiness, the insecurities, the hopes and
misunderstandings of the women are balanced by their individual strengths and
preoccupations in a manner that’s completely engrossing. Carefully chosen to
mirror and counterfoil each other, the characters Unger has created pull the
novel together as much as the plot does.
Which brings us to
the next reason it’s difficult to put the book down. It’s perfectly paced. The
twists and pieces of information are placed at exactly the right intervals: not
too frenetic but enough to keep the action on a moderate to high level. Things
speed up towards the end – as they should do, in any decent thriller. It’s all
in Goldilocks’s Just Right club.
One thing I found
curious was that this isn’t a very ‘writerly’ book, despite the obvious skill
across many sectors. It’s stuffed full of ‘tell-not-show’ writing and the
sentence structure is (quite possibly entirely intentionally) simple and
uncomplicated. The tell-not-show incidence is much more pronounced at the start
of the novel, where Unger gives the impression that she doesn’t care to beat
about the bush in getting the characters sketched out for us and doesn’t rely
on or trust the reader to make inferences from actions until they’ve been
firmly sat down and told what exactly is going on with the protagonists. What
does this all lead to? A book that slips down very easily. The reader isn’t called on to make informed judgments,
leaps of understanding or deep psychological analysis. It’s pretty much laid
out for them, with a napkin at the side and a toothpick for later. Sometimes,
it’s pretty pleasant to sit down to fare like that, and one could easily
overeat. I imagine Heartbroken will
appeal to a very wide female audience.
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