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PENUMBRA
by Carolyn Haines
St Martin's Minotaur, April 2006
288 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 0312351607


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

In a placid, rural county of Mississippi in the years after World War II, Marlena Bramlett, a pretty young wife, takes her little daughter with her to a remote glade to meet a travelling salesman for a little picnic, a little fishing, and a little something else. Their idyll is horrifyingly interrupted by two brutal men and, hours later, Marlena is found raped and beaten almost to death, her child missing. The salesman, too, is gone, though no one but she knows it yet.

Jade Dupree is Marlena's half-sister, a fact which everyone in town knows but no one ever mentions, because Jade and Marlena's mother is the town's queen bee, but Jade's daddy was a black man. Jade was fostered in the home of black family servants, and raised with great love, but she knows her origins as well as everyone else does. She is smart and capable, as well as beautiful, and more or less accepts her awkward position, out of love for her foster parents and a certain fatalistic awareness that things are tough all over.

So the social fiction that the two women are not related is maintained, and despite these painful constraints Jade loves her sister and often babysits her niece. Naturally, she gets caught up in the quest to discover what happened to Marlena and the little girl.

There's a lot to like about this book; I really liked the atmosphere, and the period is very well evoked. The racism of the time and place, as omnipresent and unremarked as air, touches every page, but there is also the country setting: one is immersed in the space, the quiet, the heat and the dust and the bugs. The main characters are well drawn and interesting; both Jade and the sheriff's deputy, Frank Kimble, are likeable and believable, and I enjoyed their journey together.

I did have some problems with aspects of the plot. There were quite a few threads running through the tale, some of which were over or under-weighted in relation to the main story. And there were some questions raised that were not answered; for example, we are introduced to Marlena's best friend, Dotty, and then shown how puzzling everyone felt their friendship to be, given the differences in their personalities, but no explanation is ever advanced. The resolution of the mystery was a bit chaotic and therefore slightly disappointing, although I liked the realism of the denouement. Altogether, an entertaining and readable book, despite a few flaws.

Reviewed by Diana Sandberg, April 2006

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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