Providence Isn't Always a Good Thing... But This Book, Is (review)

Let’s just start this off by cutting to the chase, hmm? Caroline Kepnes’ newest release, Providence, is one of the most beautiful stories I’ve read in, well… a long, long time. Actually, one of, in ever. 

Yeah, I know… way to build up the suspense and make sure everyone reads to the end of the review, GlamKitty. Well, so be it. I mean, how often does anyone heap that sort of praise on a detective-slash-coming-of-age-slash-supernatural-slash-horror tale (that’s also a love story)? Pretty much never.
But okay, since you don’t want to just take my word for it, let’s peel a layer off the onion and get a taste of Providence...
______________________________
Jon is a nice kid. He brings the mouse from one of his classes home from school over the holidays to care for it. He’s kind, funny, quiet and… okay, a little “different” from other kids his age (but especially the other boys, who pick on and bully him mercilessly). 

Chloe is Jon’s only friend, and is all of those things, as well… but she manages to straddle the fence between the “cool” kids, Jon, and, everyone else. No one understands why she’s friends with Jon, but they don’t shun her because of it, either.

When Jon disappears on his way to school one morning, it's nothing more than a momentarily-interesting blip in the lives of everyone in the small New England town— save Jon’s parents, who’re going out of their minds missing their only child, and Chloe.

A few years pass… and then one day, out of the blue, Jon reappears, with a crazy story. (I won’t spoil the details, but suffice it to say he was taken--by someone who had a very specific plan for him in mind--but he can’t remember any of it.)

Here's the catch: Jon doesn’t come back as the Jon everyone remembers—the small, weak boy who was such a ready target for the bullies. This is the New, Improved version—a strapping, handsome young man and… something else, besides.

Again, it’s up to you to read the story to discover what “else” there is, but trust me, you’ll want to… because the unraveling of that mystery (by Jon, by Chloe, and by a detective known as “Eggs” who just can’t let it go)—and, more importantly, the quest by Jon to undo the big “it”—is at the heart of this entire tale. 

There’s only everything Jon (unwillingly) left behind, to try and recapture… but the most important, by far, being the heart of his one-and-only best friend.
_______________________________________________
As with her previous books (You, briefly reviewed here, and Hidden Bodies, reviewed here), I'm left feeling sort of stunned; Kepnes is a virtuoso at putting you right in the middle of her main characters’ thoughts, so that you feel what they feel, and are left with no doubt as to the motivations for any of their actions. (It would seem like something every author should do well… but after reading Kepnes, I realize a great many authors fall far short of it, in actuality.)

She also has quite a knack for giving a great feeling of place—and, particularly in Providence, deftly portrays the whole twisted mess of emotions involved in “going back home”.

Literate (as well as literary, with references to Lovecraft woven throughout), sad, hopeful, real, suspenseful, heartfelt, and… yes, utterly, heartwrenchingly beautiful, in the end. I dare you to read Providence and not care about Jon, Chloe, and Eggs… and I dare you not to get at least a little misty-eyed.

~GlamKitty

Comments

Post a Comment

No ads or shilling, please. And always, always be polite.

Popular posts from this blog

Prowling the Streets in Search of Justice: A SuperHero is Born

Image
Growing up, I idolized Wonder Woman. She had it all--awesome strength and beauty, intelligence and kindness. To me, she was female perfection. Ever practical, I knew I’d never achieve that ideal (she was just fantasy, after all), but following her tireless quest to rid the world of evil and replace it with love and peace allowed me to envision a place and time in which women enjoyed real power and respect (and could fix problems without a lot of senseless bloodshed). It's never all about thrilling feats of derring-do, of course.  There’s a bit of melancholy attached to any superhero story too-- sometimes a sense of loss, and always feelings of loneliness. Nothing comes without a price.  Raymond Benson explores what it would be like to become an all-too-human superhero in his new book, The Black Stiletto . ✒ ~ ✒ ~ ✒ ~ ✒ ~ ✒ Martin Talbot is a just a regular Joe. Ordinary-looking, middle-aged, and divorced (with shared custody of an only daughter), he’s not the sort to inspire...
Read more

Werewolves in London? Try Bloodsuckers Down Under (Aussie urban fantasy/thriller REVIEW)

Image
Aside from a few dozen or so songs--the unremittingly-cheery sort of dreck I can only charitably term “uplifting”--there seems to be something of a universal consensus that life can be pretty awful. Sound overly harsh? Let’s look to some experts then, shall we? Consider that the first of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths is that “life means suffering”. Think back to John Hobbes, who concluded in his 1651 book Leviathan that life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. “ Of course, if you prefer your proof to be of the less-erudite variety, there’s always that late-20th-century classic, “Life sucks, and then you die”. (Lacks a bit in the eloquence department, but it gets the same point across, in inimical Bill-&-Ted fashion.) With such depressing thoughts bearing down on us like so many dark, angry stormclouds--and the fact that most of us have just seen too much bad to fall for the false promises in those sappy songs--it's no wonder a lot of people look for ways to escape t...
Read more

A Nightmare Without End: Abduction & the Long Road Back

Image
Danger takes many forms. Most of us--once we’ve become rather uncomfortably aware of our own mortality--make an effort to take at least a few precautions to ward ourselves from some of the dangers we face.  At a bare minimum, we look both ways before crossing the street. We inoculate ourselves against deadly diseases. We bolt our doors and lock our windows to all the scary things (and bad people) that go bump in the night. We fasten our seat belts before setting out on the roadways in our little hunks of metal (although statistics show that a lot more of us could stand to be doing that ). Taking such measures is empowering; we’re proactively doing something to safeguard ourselves. So many other things, of course, are completely outside the realm of our control. We’re unable to prevent cancers or illnesses that we’re genetically predisposed to getting. We’re at the whims of Mother Nature when it comes to floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and such. We can’t predict if a random stran...
Read more