It's a sweet romance with some suspense, and the author makes some good points, BUT...
Title: The Edge of Recall
Author: Kristen Heitzmann
Date: 2008
Publisher: Bethany House
ISBN: 978-0-7642-2831-5
Length: 412 pages
Quote: “Could anyone truly believe she’d killed Smith?”
The Edge of Recall has some plot elements some readers will enjoy. As a mildly comic, lightly romantic novel of suspense it features likable twenty-somethings who form friendships easily, across what older people might perceive as social barricades. The author has fun with the word “monster,” as an obsolete term of contempt for a funny-looking person, a term of exaggerated moral opprobrium for a repulsive rich man, and of course a word for the murderer—there is a murderer, although at the moment cited, when Tessa thinks someone else is the murderer and realizes the sheriff thinks she's the murderer, there's not yet been a murder. There’s a very sweet, painfully slow-building romance for the main characters, a faster-paced romance for their friends, and a Nabal/Abigail story for a couple who aren’t so nice. There's an uncomfortably close-up and realistic look at the ambivalent relationships many people have with "mental health professionals": is Tessa's psychiatrist helping or hurting her recovery from a fictively real trauma? There are moments of spiritual reflection and, to the extent that one can believe the story, spiritual growth.
How much can one believe the story? A novel of romantic suspense is supposed to keep readers guessing, without making us feel we’ve been deliberately misled. Romances used to have a choice between sweetly sad and sweetly happy endings; when I read a nineteenth-century romance for the first time I’m in some suspense as to whether both the hero and the heroine will survive to the end of the book. The twentieth century’s overwhelming preference for happy endings, which shows no signs of subsiding, leaves very little suspense in romances written after about 1910. In fact, it’s the lack of suspense that makes some writers feel that the romance form is useful; readers know how it’s going to end, so they’re reading for the details along the way, so although commercial packages (er, publishers) usually choose a travel advertisement, writers can package anything from an evangelical tract to a crossword puzzle as a romance novel. The Edge of Recall is a novel of romantic suspense. It conforms to the rules of the genre. Whether it’s cleverly written to keep you guessing, or annoyingly mis-written to mislead you, is for you the reader to decide.
Right. In chapter one of The Edge of Recall, Tessa wakes up in a hospital where she’s been sedated, with a vivid memory of having seen a stranger stab her friend Smith. (That’s his given name.) Smith’s body has not been found. It turns out that that's because he's not dead, but in this chapter everyone is busy looking for the perpetrator of the murder that didn't happen. An unlikely rural Maryland sheriff is ruling out the possibility that the murderer cleared the scene and discussing with Tessa’s psychiatrist whether Tessa merely imagined the attack, or did it herself.
In chapter two, a younger Tessa is having mixed feelings about working with a younger Smith, although, being a heroine of romance, she can’t stop herself. Both of them work in landscaping. Her specialty is labyrinths. He’s been hired to design a dream house for a rich couple, and called the Labyrinth Lady to join him on the site after discovering that it contains the recognizable ruins of one.
Say what? It turns out that the novel has been written out of sequence, with the "most exciting" chapter yanked out of the middle and put at the beginning. But chapter two's not the beginning either. From chapter two we have to flash back again. And again.
Then there’s the one scene where Smith and Tessa actually do some landscaping work. Kudzu roots, Tessa tells Smith authoritatively, “don’t regenerate. Once I’ve cleared all remaining crowns by hand and painted the stalks with glyphosate, I’ll only need to watch out for seeds.” This is actually an ethically acceptable use of poison—painting herbicides directly onto the target plant, rather than spraying them all over the land and through the air—although salt and vinegar would be more reliably effective on the painted stalks and safer for the humans involved. Still, it shows that Cornell sold out, and is not a reliable source of information on kudzu. Poisoning any unwanted plant also wipes out whatever natural predators it has (kudzu has very few) and may also trigger aggressive second-growth patterns, meaning you have more of the plant to clean out by hand next year. If endorsing this bad landscaping idea destroys Cornell’s academic reputation forever, Cornell would deserve no less.
Kudzu roots are worth digging up because they are useful. But what property owners need to watch out for is more kudzu vines growing in from wherever the first one grew in from. The price of owning property in an area where kudzu has been introduced, especially if efforts have been made to check its growth by spraying any chemical on it, is eternal vigilance. Kudzu is a pest species because it grows unreasonably fast. Individual roots may not be regenerating, especially not if they've been harvested, but that makes no difference; there will always be more where the ones you wasted or harvested came from. If you have kudzu and you want to have a nice clean boxwood labyrinth, without a mat of monstrous vines obliterating the difference between paths and walls, you’ll need to watch out for invading kudzu vines. Daily.
So, to a literary technique some readers will find annoying, this author has--no doubt in good faith--added a landscaping technique that will, if tried, help everyone to build a kudzu graveyard. In 2008 there was some excuse for not knowing better than this, but since 2018 there is no possible excuse for including a promotion for glyphosate in a novel. So...I burned the copy that was given to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment