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"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"--… (more)
Trending toward 4 stars. This is a small book, but very powerful. Evocative of The Lovely Bones, so you are not in for light reading, but worthwhile reading. The novel is set in a Texas town, outside of Austin -- with a small town feel, but (that's one flaw) big enough that outsiders aren't remembered or noticed on the day of the tragedy. 3 teenage girls (Zadie, Elizabeth, -- sisters and Meredith) who work in an ice cream shop are brutally murdered at closing time and the shop is torched, which botches evidence. The only witness who might be useful is the town eccentric, Hollis Finger, who is a damaged Iraqui War vet, which also hampers the investigation. The story floats in and out of the immediate past and the present, sometimes from the dead girls' perspective and sometimes from the survivors and even perpetrators' view point. Kate, mother of Zadie & Elizabeth, and owner of the shop is almost mad with grief and anger. Jack Dewey, the first fire fighter on the scene who discovers the bodies is wrecked afterward. Michael, one of the "bad guys" who drove the get-away car is not as far-removed from the scene as you would think. It's all told very airily, as if observing events from a great distance, and yet upon closer scrutiny and vivid detail from the author as he zeroes in on tiny moments in the day of and weeks that follow. The title refers to the small ways people are all connected, even when we don't want to acknowledge it. ( )
The first time I heard the voice I was terrified. It was noon, in summer, in my father's garden.... I seldom heard the voice when it was not accompanied by a light. Usually it was very bright. -Joan of Arc, from the transcript of her trial
Thomas Aquinas invented a third order of duration distinct from time and eternity, which he called aevum.... It co-existed with temporal events, at the moment of occurrence, being, as was said, like a stick in a river. Aevum, you might say, it the time order of novels. -Frank Kermode, The Sense of An Ending
It shall be called "Bottom's Dream," because it hath no bottom. -Nick Bottom, in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
Dedication
For Ava, Ellie & Tommi
First words
We have always lived here, though we pretend we've just arrived. That's the trick, to make forgetful shapes with your mouth so everything feels new and unremembered. But after a while we slip up. A careless word, an uninvited smell, a tip-of-the-tongue taste of something sweet, makes the room suddenly familiar - and we have to begin again. Like startled infants, we look to your face to tell us what comes next. You came into the fire. -Chapter 1
"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"--
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