Title: The MysteriesAuthor: Marisa Silver
Published by: Bloomsbury Publishing on May 4, 2021
Genres: General Fiction
Pages: 256
Format: ARC, Paperback
Source: Raincoast Books
Book Rating: 8/10
From the New York Times bestselling author of Mary Coin, a masterful, intimate story of two young girls, joined in an unlikely friendship, whose lives are shattered in a single, unthinkable moment.
Miggy Brenneman is a wild and reckless seven-year-old with a fierce imagination, hellbent on pushing against the limits of childhood. Ellen is polite, cautious, and drawn to her friend’s bright flame. While the adults around them adjust to unstable times and fractured relationships, the girls respond with increasingly dangerous play. When tragedy strikes, all the novel’s characters grapple with questions of fate and individual responsibility, none more so than Miggy, who must make sense of a swiftly disappearing past and a radically transformed future.
Written with searing clarity and surpassing tenderness, The Mysteries limns the painful ambiguities of adulthood and the intense perceptions of an indelibly drawn child to offer a profound exploration of how all of us, at every stage, must reckon with life’s abundant and unsolvable mysteries.
Review:
Emotive, sobering, and nostalgic!
The Mysteries is a pensive, tragic novel that takes you back to 1973 and into the lives of two families, specifically two seven-year-old friends, Miggy and Ellen, whose worlds will be irrevocably changed and shattered one summer day when a fatal accident leaves one family devastated by loss and the other overwhelmingly consumed with guilt.
The prose is clear and precise. The characters are genuine, lonely, and flawed. And the plot is a simmering, emotional tale of life, loss, heartache, depression, grief, guilt, friendship, family, acceptance, introspection, and forgiveness.
Overall, The Mysteries is an intense, touching, compelling tale by Silver that does a lovely job of reminding us to savour every moment because life can often change in a heartbeat.
This book is available now.
Pick up a copy from your favourite retailer or from one of the following links.
Thank you to Raincoast Books for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.
About Marisa Silver
Marisa Silver is the author of The Mysteries (2021), Little Nothing (2016), a New York Times Editor's Choice, and winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Fiction, Mary Coin (2013), a New York Times Bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller's Award, and an NPR and BBC Best Book of the Year, Alone With You (2010), The God of War (2008), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, No Direction Home (2005), and Babe in Paradise (2001), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Her short fiction has won the O. Henry Prize and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic.com and many other publications, and has been included in The Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, as well as other anthologies.
In 2018, Silver was awarded the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library. In 2017, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the Creative Arts. She teaches at The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Photo courtesy of Author's Website.
