IMPERFECT WOMEN :: Araminta Hall

A version of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness and is republished here with permission.

One premise of Araminta Hall's horrible yet lovely Imperfect Women is that women absorb tragedy so others don't have to. Best friends Nancy, Eleanor and Mary each absorbed plenty as life took them down unexpected paths. Twenty-eight years after their friendship began at Oxford, Eleanor's phone wakes her at 4 a.m. It's Nancy's husband, Robert, concerned she never came home the night before.

Rather than worried, Eleanor is irritated. She alone knows that Nancy is embroiled in a year-long affair she's been trying to end. To keep Robert from involving the police, Eleanor comes clean, sure that Nancy is just off with her lover. Then Nancy is found dead on the path by a river bridge, a large wound on the back of her head.

Hall's unwinding of the mystery behind Nancy's death is so masterful the whodunit becomes a backdrop to the women and their plights. As in her prior novel, Our Kind of Cruelty, Hall's skill is highlighted in the inner workings of her characters. The author takes a different angle on the multi-perspective, multi-timeline theme; her approach serves to focus marvelously on each woman's internal struggles and her view of the others. Eleanor takes readers through Nancy's death and its aftermath, and Nancy jumps back to describe what led to her affair and death. Mary's section provides answers about Nancy's killer, and how Eleanor and Mary might move forward with the understanding that goddesses are false and they are entitled to live life to the messy full as imperfect women.

STREET SENSE: I know we don't have time for every book and often make decisions based on past reads, but this book served me up a huge helping of "Don't always write an author off after one shot." When I was assigned this book I groaned a little because I was not a huge fan of Hall's debut, which garnered a ton of pub and praise. I thought her character work was great and the premise fantastic, but I just never got it. This sophomore effort really knocked me back and I have to give Hall credit for taking the character work to the next level while also banging out a really meaningful story. The differential made me like this book all the more. I'll definitely be in for Hall's next offering.

COVER NERD SAYS:  I like it. I'm a sucker for birds and while the palette is stark and starts to lean into Florida-esque territory, it stops just short of that read. I love how the branches just barely make it to the page. To be honest, I can't even remember now if the coloring or crows connect with the material itself (I read it some time ago), but I like this cover regardless. (That's my brain failure, not a book/cover failure, by the way.)

THE LITERARY STRIKEOUT

Sometimes, as much as you might think a book is smack in the middle of your wheelhouse, straight hard cheese down the middle of the plate, you swing and miss. The titles below are three I recently whiffed on, sending me back to the dugout with my head hung and bat dragging behind me, alone in the reading minority. (Warning: The baseball metaphors don't end in the introduction.)

H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald

In hindsight, I probably should have known better about this one. While I was all in for the forging of a connection between the author and her goshawk, I blinded myself to the downside: Mabel was bred in captivity to kill for a master. I finished, but the upside of being able to dispatch an injured rabbit because of the need for the skill (so Mabel didn't eat her quarry alive) kind of took the glow off. I found parts of the book fascinating and educational, just not for me. Strike one. (Even though, very little known fact, I dated a guy in college who was a falconer. Super cute and funny=I overlooked the dead chicks in the freezer for as long as I could. Spoiler alert - not long.)



The Hearts of Men, by Nickolas Butler

Since I loved Shotgun Lovesongs and Beneath the Bonfire with the heat of 1,000 suns, Butler became an author I would read without knowing anything about his latest work. That just bit me in the ass, though I would have picked up Hearts even after reading the summary. It *sounded* great, but the execution didn't work for me. I loved (yet hated, because mean kids suck) the first section and was engrossed in the premise of seeing how Nelson would respond, what his life would become, after camp. But then I got a looping curveball that took me off to visit other characters I really didn't enjoy reading about. It all came back around, but by that time I was just going through the motions and the ultimate shocking event seemed contrived and more than a bit eye-rolling. I'll still go back for Butler's next offering, but right now I'm sitting on an 0-2 count.


Our Kind of Cruelty, by Araminta Hall

I was so in for this one. I admit it, the Gillian Flynn blurb got me. I'm not even sure where/when I saw it, because I am not a blurb-reader. Weird as it may seem, I love spending time in the mind of a well-written narcissistic sociopath. [Deleted great line about the biggest one in my life]. I found Mike Hayes fascinating and was impressed with the job Hall did writing from his head. Here's the gist: Mike and his ex-girlfriend V played a game called Crave. They would go out, super attractive V would sit by herself until someone hit on her, at which time Mike would intercede and they would go off to have hot sex somewhere nearby. When V breaks up with Mike and becomes engaged to another man, he is certain she has just taken the game to the next level and he continues to play. It's a fantastic concept and for the first half of the book I was transfixed. But by 3/4 of the way through it felt a bit old and the twist I was hoping for never really twisted. The ultimate question of "Was she playing or wasn't she?" aside, it felt like it went off into a statement on victim-shaming that didn't really fit for me. Strike three, I'm out.