![Imagen de portada para See How Small [electronic resource] : A Novel](https://images.yourcloudlibrary.com/delivery/img?type=DOCUMENTIMAGE&documentID=gz7c489&token=nobody "Imagen de portada para See How Small [electronic resource] : A Novel")
Resumen
Resumen
A riveting novel about the aftermath of a brutal murder of three teenage girls, written in incantatory prose "that's as fine as any being written by an American author today" (Ben Fountain).
One late autumn evening in a Texas town, two strangers walk into an ice cream shop shortly before closing time. They bind up the three teenage girls who are working the counter, set fire to the shop, and disappear. See How Small tells the stories of the survivors -- family, witnesses, and suspects -- who must endure in the wake of atrocity. Justice remains elusive in their world, human connection tenuous.
Hovering above the aftermath of their deaths are the three girls. They watch over the town and make occasional visitations, trying to connect with and prod to life those they left behind. "See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart," they say. A master of compression and lyrical precision, Scott Blackwood has surpassed himself with this haunting, beautiful, and enormously powerful new novel.
Reseñas (5)
Reseña de Publisher's Weekly
Whiting Writers' Award-winner Blackwood (We Agreed to Meet Just Here) has produced a genre-defying novel of powerful emotion, intrigue, and truth. From the opening pages, which artfully skirt from past to present, it's clear that an atrocity has befallen Elizabeth, Zadie, and Meredith, the three teenage girls staffing the front counter at Sandra's ice cream shop. Killers assault the girls, bind them, and set the building on fire. The merciless crime's aftermath, affecting everyone in the Texas town-including devastated, revenge-consumed mother Kate, town firefighter Jack, and the arsonists themselves-forms the core of the story as each character's life is detailed through the 60 brief, vividly realized chapters. As anniversaries of the murders pass, Blackwood resurrects the three young women on a ghostly plane. They populate Kate's dreams, hang around town, and appear to the eccentric Hollis Finger, who may hold the key to solving the crime. Reminiscent of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones and based on a similar, still-unsolved 1991 case in Austin, Tex., Blackwood explores the effects of senseless crime on an innocent, tightly knit community, using deft prose to mine the essence of human grief and compassion. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The grisly deaths of three girls radiate across a community, which becomes as fragmented as this novel's impressionistic prose."The men with guns did things to us." The second novel by Blackwood (We Agreed To Meet Just Here, 2009, etc.) opens with a harrowing collective invocation by a trio of teenage girls working in an Austin ice cream shop, two of them sisters, who in a robbery, were bound and gagged with their underwear, then killed when the shop was burned down. In brief chapters thick with fire and ghost imagery, Blackwood alternates among a handful of men and women affected by the tragedy: Kate, the mother of two of the girls; Jack, a firefighter who entered the carnage; Hollis, an Iraq vet and witness; Rosa, a reporter; and Michael, the getaway driver for the killers. A more conventional novel might apply a worlds-in-collision template to these characters, emphasizing their shared experience. But Blackwood's style is much more slippery, and his characters' struggles are more particular and isolated. Michael's grip on reality slackens as his drug use increases and he struggles to keep custody of his daughter, while Hollis finds his PTSD triggers resurgent, and Kate cycles through relationships. The connective thread among them isn't so much the tragedy as the dour, vaguely symbolic experiences they have, from the portentous utterances of Michael's grandmother-in-law ("Are you from the planet of men?") to interludes in the voices of the dead girls themselves. The novel is strikingly creepy, if a bit affectedthe brevity of the chapters and gauzy prose have a lyrical effect but also make the story feel diffuse, with no one peculiar, uncanny moment given the chance to build up a head of steam. Blackwood is an excellent stylist, though in the name of unconventionality, the reader lacks a few narrative toeholds. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Reseña de Booklist
In a story line based on an actual event, three teenage girls (two sisters and their friend) are brutally murdered and then set on fire in an ice-cream shop in Austin, Texas. The spirits of the dead girls are then able to observe the reactions of various people, including their parents, the fireman who found them, witnesses to the atrocity, and the likely suspects. Everyone suffers in the aftermath: the fireman is haunted by the moment he first observed their charred bodies, one of the mothers completely upends her life but finds no peace, and one of the witnesses, a war veteran suffering from PTSD, has frequent visions of the dead girls. Both sad and dispassionate, the novel has much to say about the mysteries of the human psyche, the far-reaching effects of violence, and the disparate ways grief works on people. Although See How Small bears a certain resemblance to The Lovely Bones (2002), its commercial appeal will be narrower because it's made up of snippets of narrative that jump back and forth in time, all relayed in dreamlike prose and shrouded in ambiguity.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2014 Booklist
Reseña de New York Review of Books
BUILDING A BETTER TEACHER: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone), by Elizabeth Green. (Norton, $16.95.) Abandoning the myth of the "natural-born teacher," Green argues that effective teaching is often the result of cultivating a precise skill set, not an individual's charisma. Her account reports on the research behind teacher training and considers how to introduce these methods into more classrooms. A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS, by Marlon James. (Riverhead, $17.) The winner of this year's Man Booker Prize, James's third novel is centered on the real-life 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley, chronicling nearly three decades of violence and political upheaval that originated in Kingston and spilled into Brooklyn, Miami and beyond. Equal parts "spoof, nightmare, blood bath, poem," the story "takes on a mesmerizing power," Zachary Lazar wrote here. ALL THE TRUTH IS OUT: THE WEEK POLITICS WENT TAB-LOID, by Matt Bai. (Vintage, $15.95.) Gary Hart, once the front-runner for the 1988 Democratic nomination, is at the heart of this engrossing account, which describes how the press reported on Hart's rumored affairs, torpedoing his political career and breaking an unspoken understanding that journalists would keep quiet about politicians' dalliances. Bai, a former New York Times Magazine writer, calls this a turning point that continues to shape politics and media. SEE HOW SMALL, by Scott Blackwood. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $14.99.) Blackwood's novel, based on the unsolved murders of four teenagers in 1991 Texas, considers the lasting impact of violence. Narrated by a chorus of the city's residents, including a brain-injured veteran who witnessed the crime, the book forms a thoughtful portrait of a grieving town. THE BOMBERS AND THE BOMBED: Allied Air War Over Europe, 1940-1945, by Richard Overy. (Penguin, $18.) The Allied-led area bombing campaign of German civilian areas remains hotly contested: Its supporters have argued that the practice was the best option to defeat Hitler, while its detractors denounce the strategy as unfocused and unnecessarily brutal. The author soberly evaluates its genesis, implementation and legacy, including the moral questions that still linger. THE ASSASSINATION OF MARGARET THATCHER: Stories, by Hilary Mantel. (Picador, $16.) A master storyteller, Mantel, whose historical, Tudor-era novels "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up the Bodies" both won the Man Booker Prize, joins classic storytelling techniques with the surreal in this collection, which our reviewer, Terry Castle, praised as an "unusually mordant verbal fantasia." POOR MAN'S FEAST: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking, by Elissa Altman. (Berkley, $16.) Altman, a former food editor who once favored haute cuisine, recounts her transformative romance with Susan Turner, who found balance, simplicity and peace in a small Connecticut town. ?
Library Journal Review
On an ordinary day in Austin, TX, Kate Ulrich's two teenage daughters and their friend are brutally murdered while closing up an ice cream shop. Five years after the still unsolved crime, the three girls are a collective "we"-visiting and observing Kate, their other parents, the man who found them, and witnesses. The stories of the victims and the traumatized survivors are told in nonlinear, dreamlike snatches-memories surfacing or vignettes from past and present. The girls float in and out of focus for the reader and the survivors, unable to break through the very thin barrier separating the living and the dead. The characters are compellingly troubled, but frequent shifts in perspective remind readers how little one can actually know about another person, whether they have a tragically short lifetime or not. VERDICT Similar on the surface to Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, this lyrical, abstract, and less sentimental novel by Blackwood (We Agreed to Meet Just Here; In the Shadow of Our House) about murdered teenage girls observing the living will probably not appeal to as wide an audience but may haunt literary fiction readers long after the unsettling ending. [One of Barbara Hoffert's "Writers To Watch," Prepub Alert, 7/14/14.]-Laurie Cavanaugh, Holmes P.L., Halifax, MA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.