June 03, 2010

BOOKS: Invisible Boy, Cornelia Read (2010)

Third volume in the Madeline Dare mystery series. (My thoughts on the first two volumes here and here.)

I find this one puzzling in the same way that I found the second, which is that Read seems to be going out of her way to make the series as non-series as it can be. This book gives us our third different setting (New York City), and another mostly new cast of supporting characters.

Part of what I enjoy about series mysteries is the chance to keep revisiting a place and a group of characters, to watch them change over time. When it's done well, supporting characters can take on a life of their own. Heck, in her most recent book, Marcia Muller let her large supporting cast take center stage while her series character spent nearly the entire novel in a hospital bed, unable to communicate.

So I'm frustrated by Read's reluctance to give us any of that. I understand the commercial imperatives that make publishers prefer series to stand-alones, but it's starting to feel as if Read has been asked for a series that she really doesn't want to write, so she's writing stand-alones in the guise of a series.

Aside from that, how's the book? Not bad. It's 1990 in New York, and Madeline has volunteered to help a distant cousin clear out an overgrown family cemetery; on her first day there, she discovers the body of a small child, its bones broken in a way that strongly suggests the child was beaten to death. Our supporting cast (this time around) features the cops and lawyers working to bring the boy's killer to justice.

Read is a bit heavy-handed in the way she sets up abuse as the theme of the novel. One of Madeline's friends may be being abused by her husband (or she may be crazy); Madeline's sister reveals that one of Mom's boyfriends abused her when she was young. And I was annoyed by the way Read and her characters paint men as the world's sole abusers; when the child's body is discovered, Madeline and her cousin immediately begin wondering whether the abuser was a father or the mother's boyfriend. Such "it had to be a man because men are evil" dialogue gets repeated way too often for comfort here, and it feels particularly clumsy because (mild spoiler here) when the culprits are revealed, the mother turns out to have significant culpability herself.

But Read knows how to tell a story, and Madeline is as entertaining a character as ever -- witty in a mildly mean way, self-deprecating, smart. I enjoyed Invisible Boy just as I'd enjoyed the earlier volumes. I only wish that Read would Madeline settle down in one place for a while.

3 comments:

Cornelia Read said...

Well, mostly I move Madeline around because her story's about 90 percent memoir of my story, and I lived in Syracuse, Pittsfield, and NYC in the years these three books were set (working at a newspaper, boarding school, and book catalog--respectively). Also, the stuff about my sister's abuse is true, as is the possible abuse of the woman Astrid is based on.

And I think the subtext of this whole book is female culpability regarding abuse by men--the point of the final flashback chapter. Certainly, there are female abusers, and horrible ones at that, but as my pal who's a special victims prosecutor in Queens (the basis of the Kyle character) put it, "in my experience, roughly eighty percent of kids are abused by the non-biological male in the family--either a stepfather or boyfriend."

Thank you very much for reading all three books--I greatly appreciate it. And thank you for such a thoughtful review!

Keith said...

Always a pleasant surprise to have the actual author stop by with a comment!

The idea of female culpability in abuse is an interesting one, and gives me a little more to think about as I digest the book.

Looking forward to a fourth volume, in which I expect Madeline to turn up at a fading Catskills resort, doing stand up while Dean solves an engineering crisis in Gstaad.

Cornelia Read said...

Fourth one is set in Boulder, Colorado--about halfway done. May have to send Dean to Gstaad...