Last year, I had read and loved T. Greenwood's beautifully written novel Rust & Stardust, her fictional retelling of the Sally Horner case. The way that story was written — hauntingly powerful, heartfelt, sincere...a deeply emotional story that shook me to the core and continued to stay with me long after I had finished reading it. Given this background, when I was offered a galley of Greenwood's next novel Keeping Lucy, I eagerly accepted. After reading the summary and discovering that it would be about a mother forced to send her baby daughter, born with Down Syndrome, away to a special needs school, I expected another deeply emotional, heartfelt story. Going into this book with such high expectations, I'm sorry to say that I ended up sorely disappointed with how this one turned out.
From the writing to the characters to the execution of the story, Keeping Lucy felt completely opposite to what Rust & Stardust had been — to the point that, as I was reading, I couldn't help shaking my head and wondering whether this could've been written by the same author whose previous book I had adored. The story actually started off fine, as the opening chapters did a great job of setting up the story as well as the emotional undertones for the events that I thought were about to unfold — a heart-wrenching story about Lucy, the horrors she endured at that school, and her mother's fight to get her back. Unfortunately, about a quarter of the way into the story, the plot went completely off the rails and instead of getting to hear Lucy's emotional story as I expected, it became a "road trip" story of sorts when Ginny (Lucy's mother) and her best friend Martha decide to drive across the country with the kids in tow. From there, the remainder of the story was pretty much about the various situations that Ginny and Martha get themselves into and how they wind up getting themselves out of them. It felt as though Lucy's story was placed on the back burner, glossed over and forgotten, only brought back out to the forefront when it was convenient to do so, but still sparingly for the most part, as that "terrible place" and the horrors Lucy must have endured are repeatedly alluded to but rarely addressed directly.
The writing this time around was also off. Whereas with Rust & Stardust, the writing felt lyrical and poetic and there was a strong sense of time and place, I unfortunately didn't feel any of that with Keeping Lucy. The writing in this one felt a bit all over the place – overly descriptive in some parts, not descriptive enough in others. There was also a lot of what I would classify as "unnecessary descriptions of the mundane" – for example, descriptions along the lines of the following: 'she got in the car, turned the key in the ignition, pressed one foot on the clutch, the other on the brake, put her hands on the steering wheel, and looked out the windshield in front of her' (paraphrased and not direct quote from the book!) – which dragged the story down tremendously for me. Instead of the many superfluous descriptions that seemed to be of little significance and did nothing to advance the plot, it would have been better to use that space to actually tell Lucy's story.
With all that said, what frustrated me the most about this book was actually the characters — specifically the adult characters in the story — most of whom were unlikable. The way Ginny's character was written especially frustrated me – throughout the time that Ginny and Marsha were on the run, a significant portion of the story consisted of a constant barrage of Ginny's thoughts as she debated back and forth (often in her own mind) about everything from her decision to run away, to the status of her marriage, to her relationship with her husband's domineering parents, etc. Oftentimes, Ginny came across as fickle and never quite able to make up her mind about anything, though the most annoying part for me was how her thoughts always seemed to get caught up in an endless loop where she's wracked with guilt one minute, anger the next minute, then doesn't know how she feels the minute after that – the pattern seemed to be that she would reflect about all the regrets in her life, how she deliberately chose to stick her head in the sand, to ignore the signs and keep quiet when she should've said something, but then she turns around and tries to justify why things happened that way, that perhaps it's no one's fault, then realizes she is making excuses, wakes herself up to reality, then tries to push all the thoughts out of her mind completely. I usually don't mind flawed characters in a story as long as they are written realistically, but when the portrayal goes overboard to the point that it becomes melodrama that detracts from the story itself, that's when it becomes too much for me -- instead of being able to connect with the character or feel any type of empathy for what they're going through, I feel annoyed and frustrated instead.
This was a book that I really really wanted to like, but found it extremely hard to do so. With that said, I won't discount this author yet, as I've only read 2 books of hers so far that have fallen on the opposite ends of the spectrum for me. Hopefully Greenwood's next book will be able to deliver a heartfelt and emotionally resonant story along the lines of Rust & Stardust rather than Keeping Lucy.
Received ARC from St. Martin's Press via NetGalley.
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