Nevada Barr is know for her well-done, 19-book mystery series featuring Anna Pigeon, a park ranger working in various U.S. National Parks. These are serious books that are a blend of cozy and police procedural, although some characters are a bit quirky. I was recently attracted to Barr’s standalone book, What Rose Forgot, after reading the blurb on Goodreads:
In New York Times bestselling author Nevada Barr’s gripping standalone, Rose Dennis a grandmother in her sixties, emerges from a mental fog to find she’s trapped in her worst nightmare. She awakens in a hospital gown, only to discover that she’s been committed to a Dementia Unit in a nursing home. With no memory of how she ended up in this position, Rose is sure that something is very wrong. When she overhears one of the administrators say, “she won’t make it through the week,” Rose is convinced that if she’s to survive, she has to get out of the nursing home. She avoids taking her medication, puts on a show for the aides, then stages her escape.
The only problem is — how does she convince anyone that she’s not actually demented? Her relatives were the ones to commit her, all the legal papers were drawn up, the authorities are on the side of the nursing home, and even she isn’t sure she sounds completely sane. But any lingering doubt Rose herself might have had is erased when a would-be killer shows up in her house in the middle of the night. Now Rose knows that someone is determined to get rid of her.
Being 74 and a wee forgetful myself, it had me curious. It promised to be quite the thriller!
It does have a lot of suspense, which is why I kept turning pages and finished within 48 hours. But the tone was not so dark, foreboding, and scary as I had anticipated; it managed to create tension yet also be generally light in tone, humorous in a number of points, and be all-around fun to experience. It could make a great PG-rated family-movie, done right. The fun is due to Rose having similarities to Mrs. Pollifax (by Dorothy Gilman) and Victoria Trumbull (by Martha’s Vineyard author Cynthia Riggs). For here in Rose we have an elder female protagonist who manages to perform rather amazing physical feats; she climbs out on the roof of her house to fight off her would-be killer, she gets into a knock-down, drag-out fight with a big and strong night shift nurse, she tails suspects using a Lyft car service. Rose is a bit larger than life.
Then you add in the family members that aid her: Mel, a 13-year old granddaughter who saves Rose’s skin several times and a much older recluse sister, Marion, a techie who can find out things via the “dark web” (“without hacking”). By the fourth or fifth chapter, it’s clear this is not going to be a “serious” book, and that the characters are a bit exaggerated, and the plot is a little over the top.
While it wasn’t breathlessly, a “thriller,” the suspense pulled me from one chapter to the next. I enjoyed it; there was not as much to “think about” as I had expected, or wanted, but I can recommend it as a fast mystery with a moderate degree of suspense broken up with humorous nuggets, quirky characters, and a few left-sided political barbs.
So I finished the book and a day later I am wondering about why I accept over-the-top plots in a book like this one, yet do not accept them in Tana French’s The Likeness (about which, there is a separate post on this blog).
I think the answer is this: The Likeness is a serious book and What Rose Forgot is not. A serious book sets the stage for serious expectations about the realism of characters, plot, mood, and theme. It is possible to introduce unusual and unexpected descriptions of people (a detective drawn into the aura of unity and love), circumstances (like a doppelgänger), settings (that of a cult-like family), institutions (like a corporation where employees are constantly surveilled), and even scientific facts (like a bad guy who can take control of someone else’s car with a remote controller) – IF, the author can pull the reader into the story with realism in other aspects of the story, referring to known facts to build a bridge of credibility, and does not distract the reader by introducing too many unusual and unexpected aspects to the story.
In What Rose Forgot, there are a number of laugh-out loud moments – like when she gets an accomplice to disguise himself with a Donald Trump mask. Then, there’s when Rose plans to rendezvous with granddaughter Mel in her backyard clubhouse (which Mel has outgrown). Since Mel will be loaning her cell phone to Rose, they wonder how Rose can let Mel know that she has arrived and is hiding in the clubhouse. Rose suggests:
“I’ll put a pillow in the window so you’ll know I’m there. … How does that sound?”
Mel clearly isn’t impressed with the pillow idea. Rose watches as the girl tries to put together an argument against it.
At length, Mel blows out a long derisive breath. “Before cell phones, did you guys have to be all Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew all the time?”
“All the time,” Rose says.
“Talk about early childhood mortification,” Mel says.
So, What Rose Forgot can be a fun ride, if you suspend your credibility. It’s sort of like what happens if you watch Gibson and Glover in the movie franchise, Lethal Weapon. Sure it’s a cop show, but it isn’t Fargo or The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. You know it is over the top, but it is tongue in cheek as well as “cheeky” — and that’s where some of the laughs come in.
On the other hand, The Likeness is a serious book. It takes itself seriously, and it tells a serious story – one however in which the reader must suspend belief. There was the matter of the doppelgänger plot device. There was this cult-like pull on a police officer. There was this weird mystical identification that Cassie had with Lexie — not just one thing, but many that are tough to accept. A serious book should be reasonably realistic. Believable. French tries (and succeeds with maybe most readers) to make the actions of the Detective Cassie Maddox believable via the psychological profile she builds of Cassie and her relationships with the others. Providing reasonable motives is a convention we expect in good mystery writing.
But it is not the only convention. Readers expect authors to play “fair” by following a number of conventions. If an author chooses to break a convention, they do well to limit the number of conventions they break.
Other conventions are to clear up loose ends, to provide a twisty or surprising ending that makes sense given previous hints and clues, to provide realistic “red herrings,” and so on. In The Likeness, French does well at providing believable motives, but does not tie up loose ends too well. In particular, as I wrote in the other post, she does not tell us with certainty who stabbed Lexie.
But I couldn’t make the leap, partly because it involved many kinds of leaps, but also because I was distracted by:
- Unidentified “bad guy.”
- Unacceptable behavior by undercover detective. She hid the diary evidence from Frank – her superior, she ripped off her hidden mic at a dangerous moment…. she was sucked in by the allure of the cult (?). It was dangerous, it prolonged the investigation, and the motive was, in my view, stupid. It turned me off.
So the magic that other readers felt (the literary quality and the in-depth psychological emotions described) was lost on me.
So, when it comes to accepting unusual elements or buying into an over the top plot line, (1) the tone of the book matters; readers can play along more easily if it is “all in good fun” but maybe not so much when it is a serious story and tone; (2) if the author overplays her hand with too many over-the top factors, it can fail with a reader; and 3) if the author distracts the readers with too many broken conventions, the reader may be too upset to buy into the rest of the “explanations.”
