Rating: WARTY!
This novel highlights the serious problem of choosing to write in first person PoV. The author is confined to reporting only what their primary character sees and hears. They cannot move from that perspective, which severely restricts and limits the story. It's also an appallingly arrogant PoV: everything is "I" - what I did, what I saw, what I felt - who cares about anyone else?! It's the most obnoxious form of writing and few writers can carry it without inflicting pain upon their readers. This novel makes it worse by bouncing back and forth between PoVs so much that the reader risks whiplash.
The author of Twillyweed acknowledges that this is a real problem by beginning this novel in third person before making an uncomfortably clunky shift to first person: primary antagonist Claire Breslinksy's PoV. It did not make for good reading. The novel also has a prologue which turned me off. Prologues are antique and I always skip them. I have never read a novel yet where skipping the prologue put me at a disadvantage, which is testimony to how pointless prologues (and introductions, prefaces, etc., etc.) truly are.
The story here is that in seeking her birth mother, an Irish girl travels to Long Island and "stumbles upon a terrible secret"! Jenny Rose Cashin is Claire Breslinsky's niece - the illegitimate offspring of Claire's sister Carmela and Claire's ex-husband Johnny. Jenny says, "Oh Gee, I'm sorry"? I haven't lived in Ireland - visited only briefly once, but I felt this was more of an Americanism - Oh gee! - than something which the Irish person would say, but maybe I'm wrong on that score. I would think they'd be more likely to say, "Oh Jeese!", but it's no big deal.
I've read none of the Claire Breslinsky stories to this point (assuming there are others), so I'm meeting her afresh, and I wasn't impressed. She first appeared as a truly whiny woman bemoaning her fate. She had gotten rid of her husband Johnny, who she now whined was failing to support their sons who are in college. Yes he's morally at fault, but not legally since both boys are now over eighteen and an insurance payout paid for the boys' college tuition anyway. Claire has gotten herself involved with a fireman now, sporting the unlikely name of Enoch, who seems at first blush to be rather condescending towards Claire who seems at second blush to invite condescension.
Jenny is consistently referred to as Jenny Rose which I found annoying in short order. There were also some odd words used in the text. Once example used to indicate, presumably, that she opened a package is: "She kipped it open..." which makes no sense unless there's an alternate meaning (in Irish usage) of a word which means taking a nap! (p15). The author ought to be aware that not everyone will get colloquialisms.
At the end of a section on page 16, right before the story returns to Claire's first person PoV, there's a weird section that's italicized and appears to be told from the PoV of an acquaintance of Jenny's (always referred to as Jenny Rose!) named Wendell. It comes out of nowhere and makes no sense. Then we're back to Claire's 1PoV. I think this section might have been intended to represent thoughts of the killer, but it came after an italicized sentence which was Jenny's thought, and there was only a line break between the two, so initially and confusingly, it appeared to be a continuation of the thoughts she had begun. It was not well done, and this seemed to be a pattern in this novel.
It was at this point that I really started to feel like I didn't honestly want to read any more of this. Jenny was completely boring to me. There was nothing going on with her except her own idle thoughts and the random impressions she had of her surroundings as she arrived at the house where she would be staying and started to get settled in. It wasn't interesting at all.
Claire's next section was simply more whining. She gets a call from Carmela, but rather than let us in on what this evidently important call was all about, she breaks the fourth wall and talks to the reader about some incident from the past, which really tripped up any momentum the story might have garnered for itself with this evidently urgent phone call. I was not thrilled by yet another digression.
I made it through ten percent of this book, but I couldn't stand to keep going. I mean who says, "...sit down and attend to your brunch"? Seriously? Maybe a hundred years ago people spoke like that. Maybe that's what Enoch will turn out to be - a time-traveler from the past. He has the name for it. Actually he turns out to be something Claire didn't expect: it looks like he misled her and now there's yet another thing in her sorry life to bemoan.
For a book which includes as part of its blurb: "Jenny Rose Cashin arrives from Ireland to take a job as an au pair in a fading Long Island resort town, hoping to reconnect with her long-lost mother. But something evil lurks in the quiet beachside residences of Sea Cliff. There is a killer on the grounds of this strange art colony, and Jenny Rose will need all the help she can get from her aunt Claire to uncover the truth--and to stay alive." there was nothing happening. Nothing at all. No dead bodies or even hints of them. No hint of a killer except for the afore-mentioned misplaced and obscure italicized segment consisting of three paragraphs or so, and even that was so obscure that it was hard to tell what the heck it meant. Certainly Claire and Jenny are going to have to save the day because as you know, this is a private dick story, so the police are, of course, utterly useless.
The book came off more as a pretentious and artsy memoir than ever it did a thriller or a mystery. It was simply depressing to read, and offered nothing to interest me. None of the characters garnered my support or empathy. I didn't like any of them, and I cannot recommend this based on what I read. I know I didn't read much of this, but life is far too short to continue to plow on through a book that has failed you in every way when there are so many other books out there, taunting me with their siren calls.
