The Thin Place

I finished The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis about a week and a half ago.  I picked up this book at Barnes & Noble earlier this year – it was on one of those tables when you first walk into the store.  I know they just put books there to entice you to buy them, and it usually works on me.  As a matter of fact, I often go to browse, not to buy, with no particular title/subject/author in mind, yet I almost always leave with one or two books.  (I think I am just stalling about writing about the book, because I am not certain what to say.)

The novel has a large cast of characters, and I didn’t feel like I knew any of them at any point in the novel.  The author writes well and creates vivid images with her language, but she has a rambling, almost stream-of-conscious style that I did not particularly enjoy.  I really did not understand if there was a unifying plot to the narrative until the end, and I am uncertain that the final “big event” really summed up all the other small paths the reader travels down throughout the book.  A book does not necessarily need to have a dominant plot for me to enjoy it, but if there is no plot, then I need rich characters, or dialogue, or setting, or meaning, or something.  I just felt that this book was muddled.  Yes, that is exactly the correct word – muddled.

Of course, like I said above, most of the actual writing was excellent:

Then the sun came up; then it was another day.  The created world can be both reliable and surprising.  A bull moose was sauntering in the laid-back loose-limbed way of its kind along the boggy verge of Goneaway Lake, pausing from time to time to take a bite out of leatherleaf bush.  Clouds of blackflies swarmed around him, landed on him, in the tender places inside his ears or in the corners of his eyes or on his exposed furless underbelly, but he didn’t mind.  The day was warm and the ground under his hooves mucky and moist.  The cotton grass was just starting to open.  He had mated two months earlier, and though he had no memory of this event, it had left him with a deep sense of well-being, of things having happened the way they were supposed to happen, like the muck underfoot, and the tender new shoots of the leatherleaf, and even the flies biting his belly . . .

Great imagery, but imagery is not enough to make a great book.  I give this book 2.5 out of 5 stars.