Her entry begins:
Right now I’m reading Almost Famous Women, Megan Mahew Bergman’s new collection. I bought it last night when I got the time of a friend’s reading wrong and arrived at the bookstore more than an hour early. What was there to do but curl up with a new book? Bergman’s stories are simultaneously grounded and strange, delicate and frank. Her work reminds me of Elizabeth McCracken. When other people began to arrive and I had to put the book away, I had that fiction jet lag, when you reappear in the real world and aren’t quite sure where or...[read on]About Unbecoming, from the publisher:
A major debut novel of psychological suspense about a daring art heist, a cat-and-mouse waiting game, and a small-town girl’s mesmerizing transformationVisit Rebecca Scherm's website.
On the grubby outskirts of Paris, Grace restores bric-a-brac, mends teapots, re-sets gems. She calls herself Julie, says she’s from California, and slips back to a rented room at night.Regularly, furtively, she checks the hometown paper on the Internet. Home is Garland, Tennessee, and there, two young men have just been paroled. One, she married; the other, she’s in love with. Both were jailed for a crime that Grace herself planned in exacting detail. The heist went bad—but not before she was on a plane to Prague with a stolen canvas rolled in her bag. And so, in Paris, begins a cat-and-mouse waiting game as Grace’s web of deception and lies unravels—and she becomes another young woman entirely.
Unbecoming is an intricately plotted and psychologically nuanced heist novel that turns on suspense and slippery identity. With echoes of Alfred Hitchcock and Patricia Highsmith, Rebecca Scherm’s mesmerizing debut is sure to entrance fans of Gillian Flynn, Marisha Pessl, and Donna Tartt.
Writers Read: Rebecca Scherm.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
