Christopher J. Yates

Puts me in mind of Dan Chaon or Jonathan Moore. The plot is complicated and has some weird elements. The opening scene, that of the shooting, is pretty brutal. Matthew comes off as sick and cartoonishly villainous. Patch as dopey, trusting and lacking in self-esteem. Yates plays a lot of things close to the vest, indicating very important aspects, but only in shadow. It’s tantalizing and good for making a compelling story. People, including Hannah, aren’t telling everything they know - show more not now and not in 1982. Overall it’s a tight and reasonably original piece of storytelling.

So why the two stars? Because the whole way through Yates keeps beating us over the head about what Hannah did to bring this on herself. Yes friends it’s blame the victim time!

We are led to understand that once again, the actions of a female are too much for a male to overcome and he’s swept away in his emotions and just can’t help being violent. Say tying her to a tree and shooting her with a BB gun nearly fifty times, causing her to lose an eye and be basically traumatized for the rest of her life. Boys will be boys, right? Oy vey. That’s pretty disgusting. I kept reading to see what asinine reason he’d come up with to blame Hannah for her own assault. And given Matthew’s staunch hatred of his father and his general not caring what anyone else thinks of him, it didn’t ring true. Not at all. I guess we just wanted to make the perpetrator the hero after all. Sound familiar? show less

Grist Mill Road by Christopher J. Yate is a fascinating and devastating story. The crime and its perpetrator are never in doubt, but the motivations for it and the tragic path it sends its three young characters on are the meat of the story.

The story begins in 1982 as young Hannah is tied to a tree by Matthew who proceeds to shoot her 37 times with a BB gun, the last one through her eye. Matthews best friend Patrick “Patch” watches in horror, frozen and unable or unwilling to act. show more Leaving her for dead, the friends head back home when Patch has a change of heart and rushes back to Hannah. Hannah lives, Matthew confesses and goes to jail, and Patrick lives with his own guilt.

Twenty-six years later, we find Patch and Hannah married after running into each other a few years earlier in New York. Hannah is a successful crime reporter who still suffers night terrors. Patch discovers that Hannah is unaware of his witnessing of and inaction during the shooting. He has lost his job at the bank and spends his time writing a food blog and dreaming of opening a restaurant. When Matthew unexpectedly reappears in their lives, events begin to spiral until they lead to an ending that makes you wonder if it was avoidable or inevitable.

The narrative bounces back and forth both between 1982 and 2008 as well as between narrators. Although the main events are known, the perspective each main character brings to them shines more light on the motivation and the personal tragedies of each character. Patrick is tortured by his inaction and the secret that lies over his marriage. Hannah is good at her job, but has agreed to write a book about her own tragedy which is proving more difficult than she expected. Matthew has tried to create a new life for himself, but he cannot forget the past even as he mitigates his own role in events in his own mind.

Yates does a fantastic job of shifting between perspectives, each time changing the way you perceive events. The “what” is never the question, but the “why” will torture you almost as much as it does the characters. Hannah is the most sympathetic character, but Patch and Matthew each have complicated motivations which make it impossible to fully sympathize with them, but also allows you to see events through their eyes. The three characters move towards a conclusion that will fill you both with anticipation and dread. The conclusion is part melancholy and part cathartic. This is a book that will stay with you for a long time. Wonderfully written. Highly recommended.

The audiobook is narrated by Dan Bittner, Saskia Maarleveld, Graham Halstead and Will Damron as the three main characters and narrator. They each do an outstanding job bringing to life the characters with great inflection and pacing. They help to convey not only the action but the mental state of the characters.

I was provided a copy of this audiobook by the publisher. show less

The opening scene of Grist Mill Road is harrowing, twelve-year-old Patrick watches out of sight as his fourteen-year-old best friend Matthew shoots thirteen-old Hannah whom he has tied to a tree forty-nine times with a B.B. gun. I emphasize their ages because there are significant differences between twelve and fourteen, especially when Patrick is a young twelve and Matthew is an old fourteen.

As the contemporary narrative opens, Patrick and Hannah are married. Patrick has just lost his job show more and is struggling to find another. He is also haunted by guilt for failing to stop the shooting, an irrational guilt as it’s unlikely he could have succeeded. Moreover, he confronted Matthew, was attacked by him, feared Matthew would kill him, played dead to survive, then got up, his head bleeding from a massive blow, untied and brought Hannah to safety and saved her life. Still, his failure to say something during the shooting feels like a failure, though if he had, Matthew might have shot him, too. Hannah has no idea that Patrick witnessed the shooting and refusing to discuss what happened, gives Patrick no opportunity to tell her. Being weak-willed and deferential, he keeps his secret and feels more guilt.

They might have still managed to muddle through life more or less successfully even though Patrick loses his job and has fixated on the boss who fired him and falls into depression. But then Matthew comes back into their lives and all hell breaks loose.

Told through narratives by each of the three principals, Grist Mill Road is suspenseful and interesting on many levels. The writing is descriptive, in particular in creating a sense of place in the Finger Lakes, describing the land and how it came to be. The natural history is the best part of the book for me.

In many ways, Grist Mill Road is a successful thriller. The prose is better than competent, sometimes extraordinary. The plot is new and intriguing. It considers important themes about trust, empathy, and responsibility, but it took everything to keep from throwing it across the room in disgust. There are a couple reasons for this. There are three narratives, those of the men are fully realized and complex. Hannah’s is shallow and often driven more by her cop friend than her. Hannah seems to have no agency at all. She is only half-realized.

More seriously, Matthew shot Hannah forty-nine times and yet, we are told we “don’t know what she did” and asked to hold her partially culpable for his action. So what exactly could someone do or say that would inspire the cold-blooded forty-nine separate shots. Shooting her once? Hitting her? That says impulse and rage. Forty-nine is cold-blooded and vicious. It is considered. No, there’s no “but she” about it and that we are asked to “but she” a thirteen year old girl to forgive shooting her forty-nine times is appalling. I don’t mind being asked to feel empathy for Matthew. I feel empathy. I understand the pain he might have felt. Feeling empathy for him should never require that I accept the culpability of his victim. I found it completely offensive to be asked.

I received an e-galley of Grist Mill Road from the publisher through NetGalley.

Grist Mill Road at Macmillan | Picador
Christopher J. Yates

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2018/01/11/9781250150288/ show less

Once I began this book, I couldn't put it down. It's relentless. The tension and suspense keep on building right from the very first, and never once does the pace pick up or slow down right from where it is set at the beginning. The book skips from the summer of 1982 (in a tiny little town 90 miles north of New York City), to the summer of 2008 (in Manhattan), and back and forth it goes. The story is told from three different viewpoints, and the horrific event that occurred in August 1982 is show more recounted from those three different viewpoints. In 1982, Matthew, Patch and Hannah are 13 and 14 years old. They are in their late 30's in 2008, and it becomes apparent that none of the three have really moved on emotionally from that horrific event of their childhood. The only thing that made me hold back a star in this review was the ending. It just didn't seem to fit with the rest of the book. Some things are left hanging, and there was no final viewpoint or even any observations from any of the three protagonists. The ending was glaringly different from the rest of the book, and left me a wee bit unsatisfied. But the other 95% of it makes this book worth the read. It might even keep you up late at night while you finish "just one more chapter." show less