I'm Reviewing the Situation: A Lament for Bonnie (by Anne Emery)

I recently finished reading, A Lament for Bonnie, by Anne Emery.  The story--as the title suggests--is about a missing girl from a large musical clan in Cape Breton and touches on the lives of a sprawling cast of characters that populate some of Emery's other mystery novels.  The book helpfully contains a family tree for reference.  Unfortunately, those of us who read the electronic copy only know that the family tree would have been helpful if we had been able to flip back and forth to it as the narrator changed from chapter to chapter.

Alas.  Long live the printed book with its easy page turning. This was the first ebook I have ever read and when mulling over my thoughts at the end of it all, I realize how amorphous the story seemed.  I am not sure if this is the fault of the electronic medium or the author.  Perhaps it is a little of both.  But when two hundred electronic pages stand between the present page and the family tree, you just push through hoping that clarity will be forthcoming.

 Emery certainly writes in clean, readable prose with an obvious understanding and knowledge of police procedure and criminal law that felt a little too expositional at times.  She weaves a believable tapestry of Cape Breton history, culture and music and the sense that the missing girl exists in a real community.  The weaknesses, however, I felt were threefold: pacing; character development and narrative leaps.  That said, Emery's technical capability as a writer meant that I didn't mind finishing the story even when it seemed that the pacing lagged in the lead up to the quickly completed climax of the story.

But the real trouble I had with the novel was that after a while, I just didn't care.  I didn't care about Bonnie since as far as I was concerned she was likely a goner from the get-go and even her bereaved family seemed to be handling her absence with a surprising degree of equanimity.  No parental breakdowns at the thought that their preteen daughter was raped and murdered.  No family strife despite characters mentioning that there had been rifts in the past.  Instead, everyone participated in benefit concerts for Bonnie and got together for kitchen ceilidhs.  As a result, I didn't particularly care when the RCMP's glare of suspicion was cast over red herring characters because I wasn't invested in anyone.  If each of these characters were developed, I think it happened in one of the other novels.  

Most frustratingly for me, however, were the narrative leaps that made the story feel like the author needed to take another pass at the manuscript and fill in the weak places.  The rule of thumb for writers is to show, not tell; but it seemed I was being told a whole lot of the time.  When the police inexplicably decide some characters couldn't be guilty despite suspicious circumstances because so-and-so 'simply didn't have it in' them, but zero in on another character that was barely mentioned in the first two thirds of the novel over something that happened in the past, it gives the reader the sense that the police--for all their procedure--are more akin to palm readers or judicial commissars than detectives following where the evidence leads.  I never worried that a favourite character might be the guilty monster because I had no favourite character.  I didn't know any of them well enough.  If a book must be read in sequential order as part of a series in order for the characters to have depth that should be clear to the potential reader on the book jacket.  (I mean--if I'd had a book jacket…)  I couldn't shake the feeling that these were either the most undeveloped characters ever, or else Emery was resting on her published laurels with the assumption that readers already knew and were invested in her cast of characters.

The catch-22 of multiple narrators--and I have run into this problem myself-- is that while they offer  multiple angles on the story, they can only convey to the reader what they themselves know. As a result Emery gives us a look at the missing person case from multiple family members, a lawyer, as well as the local RCMP.   But when one of your narrators is the investigating detective and yet the actions  of the police during the rising action of the story are totally incomprehensible, it seems like the mystery author is asking the reader to accept the whole direction of the story resting on the reasoning of 'Just Because'.

Despite these drawbacks, however, I have learned a couple of valuable lessons:

1. I should never buy eBooks. They're obnoxious in their claim of supposed ease while in actual fact they're useless to the power of ten.  Maybe all of these problems listed above would have evaporated if I'd had a printed book that would have allowed for me to hold my page and flip backwards for reference. 

2. Actually, no one should buy ebooks.  They are an insult to the art form.