Innocence : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Fabulous
Review: Ever since reading Lionel Shiver's We Need to Talk About Kevin last year, I have been trying to replicate that experience. Karen Novak's Innocence comes the closest yet. Shriver's book (an incredible effort) tells the story of the mother of a Columbine-type school murderer. The intensely troubled relationship between mother and son is at the heart of the book. At the hear of Novak's book is another relationship, this time father and daughter. The relationship is just as intense and troubling as in Shriver's book, but in a slightly different way. It is a long time before we find out how Leslie really feels about her father, that conflict and uncertainty, and the shifting reality as presented in the book, bring together a tragic, but beautiful story of innocence lost.

Rating:
Summary: multiple realities
Review: I started this book on a Monday night and was busy teaching/preparing lesson plans all of Tuesday and Wednesday. My reward for my hard work was to finish reading "Innocence."
I finished the book Thursday morning with my coffee! At first the alternate realities and conflicts of both the adolescent girls and the main character (Leslie) kept me in suspense so that I could find all their problems resolved in the end. But the books deserves much more respect than that - as I soon realized. It is well-crafted, complex, and in very touch with reality as we know it. Doing the right thing is never more complex than when you are an adolescent with divided loyalties as both Leslie and her daughter illustrate. Leslie tells her father's (long overdue) story in the end, just as her daughter, Molly, reveals her own (and Lydias's) big "secrets". Or does she? Molly's story is forever evolving and we get the sense that even she doesn't know what is real or not. The complex layers of denial that Lydia's mother displays (toward her daughter's abuse by her step father) are very real. Reality is not black and white. This is also what Leslie struggles with - her fear that she is crazy - rather than accept that she "sees" things that other people do not. It is not whether she is crazy, it is whether she accepts what she sees ("nightingales"), interprets it as needed, and moves on.
I want the characters to live on in another book. Leslie returns to the police force and returns home to her husband and kids (with difficulties, of course). We find the Nightingale murders "solved" just as Leslie becomes involved in solving yet another crime in the town of Swifton Woods. (ah, but maybe the Nightingale crimes are not solved after all) A girl can dream about a sequel....

Rating:
Summary: Innocence, a loss thereof, and Novaks best work yet...
Review: Innocence, the latest novel by author Karen Novak, is incredible. But even incredible fails to fully describe the story she has so skillfully woven into these pages. Using already well-formed characters from her previous novels, as well as other references to her acclaimed Five Mile House and Ordinary Monsters (and a cute satire on American reality TV), she tells the tale of a kidnapping in a small town with a past full of dark secrets. Time bends, perceptions change, innocence is lost.

This is no mere follow-up to Five Mile. This book goes above and beyond what Novak originally accomplished to surpass all expectations.

Innocence is an incredible book, the next and best (to date) work of Karen Novak, and if you miss out on it, you may regret it for the rest of your life.

"This is how it begins..."