Bonnie Nadzam

The Short of It:

Stunning and dangerous with sharp, rusted edges.

The Rest Of It:

David Lamb is no stranger to hardships. His marriage failed miserably and he’s just buried his father. While taking a moment after the funeral to gather his thoughts, eleven-year-old Tommie stumbles into his path. She’s all limbs and freckles, yet there’s something about the girl that Lamb finds inviting. He decides to take her on a trip. To show her all the things that I girl her age should experience at show more least once.

"And there was nothing wrong with all that, was there? With a guy like him, buying a kid like her a nice lunch, spoiling her a little? It was good for her. It was just a little tonic for his poisonous heart."

Although it might sound like a re-telling of Lolita, it is far from that. Lamb is a delicately written novel that explores appropriateness and friendship in a way that at times has you questioning Lamb’s true intentions. Tommie is hitting that awkward tween stage where every question is answered with a shrug. She’s seemingly floating along without direction, so when Lamb offers her a trip to his cabin, a place where she can experience everything a young girl her age should, it doesn’t take long for her to decide that it’s what she wants to do. In Lamb’s eyes, he’s giving her the guidance and attention she so desperately needs. In her eyes, she’s getting out of her Godforsaken town to see the world.

When they begin their trip, it’s impossible to know what his intentions are. Early into the novel, I felt sure that he was having some sort of a nervous breakdown and although the decision to take the trip was not a wise one, I could see his logic and his reasons for wanting to take it. But as the trip progresses, and as they get to know one another, insecurities and all, things take a turn and that is where I began to question if Tommie was going to make it out of this okay. These moments of doubt were excruciating to read. I literally had internal conversations with myself over what was going on. What disturbed me more, is that there were times where I found myself relating to Lamb. Making excuses for him, if you will. Somehow I wanted this trip to be okay and for them both to be better for having taken it.

What makes this novel so complex is that Lamb is good for her, as she is good for him. But what makes this a dangerous, edgy tale is the fact that this fifty-something has taken an eleven-year-old girl across the country and against his better judgement, has fallen in love with her. All of a sudden, his care of her becomes a slightly dark, disturbing affair that had me sitting uneasily on the edge of my seat. When you find your soulmate, does age matter? I got mad at myself for even asking such a question but that is what Nadzam does. She works her magic and makes you question right and wrong.

I can’t go into anymore detail than that, because you must read it to get the full effect, but when a book like this has you cheering for the old guy, you stop and take notice. Lamb is wonderfully complex and rich. It’s everything that I look for in a book.

Content Note: If you shun books that center around child molestation, do not let that keep you from reading this book. This book (in my opinion) does not fall into that category and is not graphic in any way.

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"The place was uninhabitable. Too hard, too dusty, too dry, too poor, out of jobs, out of prospects. The wonder was that they had all stayed so long. For years, like a slowly lifting line of birds, there'd been a slow but steady flight out of town. Finally, inside this single summer, all but eleven people would go. One at a time, in the old brick stores and painted houses the windows were boarded or punched out with stones, eyes blind to a place that so many years ago shed so much blood to show more claim."

With stunning prose Bonnie Nadzam tells the tale of the dying town of Lions, CO. While there is a central plot in this book, for me the true enjoyment is experienced in the characters and atmosphere. There's a melancholy that runs throughout the book, as the reader shares the sense of loss and fear with the characters in this book who have no choice but to pack up and move on from the place they once knew.

"Lions" had a particular poignancy for me as I reflected on the economic changes currently underway in the U.S.

Highly recommended. 5 stars

Thank you to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for a galley of this book in exchange for an honest review. show less

The basics: Lamb takes its title from David Lamb, a middle-aged man struggling with the end of his marriage and the death of his father. When he meets 11-year-old Tommie, an unpopular girl, the two strike up an unlikely friendship of sorts and embark on a road trip from Chicago to the Rocky Mountains. Tommie goes willingly, but she does not tell anyone when she does.

My thoughts: Throughout Lamb, there is certainly an element of creepiness. It's more overt at some times than others, but the show more tension of innocence also permeates the novel. There are essentially four versions of the events in the novel: how Lamb sees things, how Tommie sees things, how Lamb explains things to Tommie, and, lastly, how the reader combines all three of these narratives. The reader also gets glimpses from the omniscient narrator, such as this one from shortly after Lamb and Tommie depart Chicago:
"How the social worker—with a long flat mane of strawberry blond hair graying at the temples—didn’t believe any of it. A handsome man who looks like some TV star befriends this unremarkable girl and takes her away? A man like that isn’t missed by his family? His boss? His wife, say? The whole thing told like a story made up by a child."
This passage is a beautiful microcosm of the novel. While a bystander might describe Lamb as a handsome tv star, the reader and Tommie already know him better than that. Just as Lamb and Tommie deal with internal conflicts about their secretive friendship and journey, the reader too must process the complexity of the situation. Nadzam never veers into oversimplified visions of good and evil or right and wrong; Lamb, the man and the novel, sit firmly in those complicated shades of grey.

The verdict: Lamb is complex and beautifully crafted tale. Lamb himself is a fascinating and flawed man, and his unreliable narration is at times a puzzle to put together: how far is his reality from reality? A delightful creepiness extends throughout this novel, but there are also moments of soft, quiet, beauty. That Nadzam managed all of this in her first novel is extraordinary. show less

David Lamb kidnaps the little girl with good intentions, and for all the best reasons. He wants to teach her a lesson about how dangerous life really is, a lesson that will protect her from those dangers for the rest of her days. The unknown narrator of Lamb, Bonnie Nadzam’s debut novel, puts it this way:

“So you see, none of this was planned. This is the kind of unforeseeable map that arises one bright little city at a time. It is about letting go of the clench in your forehead and show more letting your heart steer. And it isn’t as easy as it sounds.”

Lamb is minding his own business when the little girl, dared to do so by her two friends, brazenly walks up to him and asks for a cigarette. On his way home from his father’s funeral, and still a little numb from that experience, Lamb’s original reaction when the freckle-faced little girl approaches him is to feel sorry for her. Then he decides, with little Tommie’s complicity, to teach her friends a lesson by making it appear that he is kidnapping her by force.

“So you see, none of this was planned.”

Lamb considers himself a good man. When he looks at Tommie, he sees a little girl from a poor background and, most likely, from a broken home, who has no future unless she changes her ways soon. He wants to help her, and he thinks he can do that by taking her on a road trip from Chicago to the remoteness of the Rocky Mountains. Lamb, a fiftyish failure at his job, his marriage, and most other personal relationships, believes he still has something to offer this child.

Bonnie Nadzam will make many a reader uncomfortable with her effort to get inside the head of a man like David Lamb, a man who spends as much time trying to convince himself that his motives are pure as he does trying to convince his young victim of the same. Lamb, however, is not so self-deluded that he cannot see himself through the eyes of other adults he and his “niece” encounter along the way. As the days roll by and Lamb begins to worry about how he will ultimately extricate himself from the situation, and as Tommie allows him a greater and greater degree of physical intimacy, the reader’s tension will build to an almost unbearable level.

Although Lamb is not an explicitly sexual novel, it is most definitely a disturbing one. The source of the book’s horror is its reminder of how often evil is motivated by the best intentions, and how easy it is for a predator like David Lamb to make himself unrecognizable to the rest of us. Fair Warning: Bonnie Nadzam has written an impressive debut novel, but it is one that will not be quickly, or easily, forgotten.

Rated at: 4.0 show less