The Mysteries
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $17.99
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Mary Coin, a masterful, intimate story of two young girls, joined in an unlikely friendship, whose lives are shattered in a single, unthinkable moment.
Miggy Brenneman is a wild and reckless seven-year-old with a fierce imagination, hellbent on pushing against the limits of childhood. Ellen is polite, cautious, and drawn to her friend's bright flame. While the adults around them adjust to unstable times and fractured relationships, the girls respond with increasingly dangerous play. When tragedy strikes, all the novel's characters grapple with questions of fate and individual responsibility, none more so than Miggy, who must make sense of a swiftly disappearing past and a radically transformed future.
Written with searing clarity and surpassing tenderness, The Mysteries limns the painful ambiguities of adulthood and the intense perceptions of an indelibly drawn child to offer a profound exploration of how all of us, at every stage, must reckon with life's abundant and unsolvable mysteries.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two seven-year-old girls see their friendship ripped apart on one horrifying summer day in Silver's thoughtful latest (after Little Nothing). Miggy Brenneman is the only child of ballet teacher Jean and jazz-loving Julian, who has taken over his family's failing hardware store in 1973 St. Louis. Their neighbor Ellen Gallagher, stepdaughter of wealthy William and daughter of fragile Celeste, follows wild Miggy "like a cult devotee." While Miggy and Ellen keep an eye on Miggy's pregnant dog and play in the neighborhood, with reckless Miggy leading Ellen into uncomfortable and possibly dangerous situations, the adults mull over their regrets—for Jean and Julian, it's their "pot-infused trip to Mexico" after college graduation, during which they ran out of birth control pills; and for William, the big house he bought to surprise Celeste, who suffers postpartum depression after the birth of Ellen's baby half brother. Silver's attention to the parents pays off in the second half of the book, after they are transformed by a car accident on their street involving a suspected drunk driver. Silver's unsettling study of the painful effects of change channels the bitter nostalgia of Rick Moody.
