Her entry begins:
During the semesters, it’s hard for me to do as much reading as I’d like except for what I’m teaching. I keep teetering stacks at my bedside to catch snatches when I can, and I have managed to read a few lately with more queued up for summer.About Sycamore, from the publisher:
I just finished two shortish works: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, a beautiful, eerily magical novel about refugees and loss but also very much about the passage of love over time with a slow-building power and resonance that hits hard at the end; and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s extended letter Dear Ijeawele, Or A Feminist Manifesto In Fifteen Suggestions, which I wish could be...[read on]
Out for a hike one scorching afternoon in Sycamore, Arizona, a newcomer to town stumbles across what appear to be human remains embedded in the wall of a dry desert ravine. As news of the discovery makes its way around town, Sycamore’s longtime residents fear the bones may belong to Jess Winters, the teenage girl who disappeared suddenly some eighteen years earlier, an unsolved mystery that has soaked into the porous rock of the town and haunted it ever since. In the days it takes the authorities toVisit Bryn Chancellor's website.make an identification, the residents rekindle stories, rumors, and recollections both painful and poignant as they revisit Jess’s troubled history. In resurrecting the past, the people of Sycamore will find clarity, unexpected possibility, and a way forward for their lives.
Skillfully interweaving multiple points of view, Bryn Chancellor knowingly maps the bloodlines of a community and the indelible characters at its heart—most notably Jess Winters, a thoughtful, promising adolescent poised on the threshold of adulthood. Evocative and atmospheric, Sycamore is a coming-of-age story, a mystery, and a moving exploration of the elemental forces that drive human nature—desire, loneliness, grief, love, forgiveness, and hope—as witnessed through the inhabitants of one small Arizona town.
Writers Read: Bryn Chancellor.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
