tamaranth | 2023/029: Looking Glass Sound

2023/029: Looking Glass Sound — Catriona Ward

I don't remember writing this. Magic seems to be making its way into this book. Or maybe it started with magic, because there is a worse possibility than all of this. I'm not being haunted by a book. [loc. 2963]

Wilder's father inherits a cottage on the coast of Maine, and the family spend the summer there. Whistler Bay is idyllic, though there's a local mystery: the Dagger Man, who photographs sleeping children. Wilder meets Harper, with her British accent and her witchy rituals, and Nat, a local lad who has a difficult relationship with his father. The three become close: they visit a sea cave and whisper to the god that Nat says dwells beneath the water, but there's an accident and a serial killer is revealed. Years later, Wilder returns to Whistler Bay to write his account of the events of that summer, and his college friendship (or perhaps love affair) with Sky, who betrayed him and stole the manuscript of his first attempt to explore what happened to the three of them.

Or ... not.

This is a layered and labyrinthine novel about stories -- who tells them, how they're told, whose they are -- and identity. I've read it twice (once is definitely not enough) and am looking forward to reading it again before my 'proper' review. Wilder, Nat and (especially) Harper are compelling characters, and their emotional tangle needs, and deserves, a lot of unravelling. And Sky... Sky is something else.

I think this might be my favourite of Ward's novels -- Rawblood, Little Eve, The Last House on Needless Street and Sundial -- and I am beginning to see patterns: stories that veer in unexpected directions, endings that can be seen as happy if one squints, surviving trauma and the scars it leaves, unreliable narrators with distinctive voices. And who is more untrustworthy than a novelist?

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for the full honest review which'll be appearing nearer UK publication date (20 APR 2023).