A haunting echo SHE DOUBLES DOWN ON THE SHOWING IN HER WORD CHOICE ITSELF.

So Much Love By Rebecca Rosenblum McClelland & Stewart 288 pp; $24.95

On bookshelves since March, Rebecca Rosenblum’s first novel, So Much Love, may be due for a boost this spring, snagging a spot on the Amazon.ca First Novel Award short list set to name a winner next month. It’s got competition, to be sure, but 50 pages are about all it takes to see why Rosenblum’s in the race.

As much marital commentary as murder-mystery, So Much Love doesn’t have a central plot but several taut themes: love, the opposite of love, and the things in-between that are somehow both better and worse than whatever binds them to each. Set in could-beanywhere Canadian college town Iria, the novel’s active thrust comes courtesy of two kidnappings: high school senior Donny Zimmerman and — alongside an exploration of what defines “kid-” in the “-napping” context — Catherine Reindeer, married adult student mulling children herself.

So Much Love moves via many little twists, great in number but slyly stated and never fully turning to surprise, this award-winning short story writer favouring a deft literary half-ollie to any startling jolt somebody else’s showier whodunit might prefer. Rosenblum bolsters So Much Love with a weighty sub-plot parallel punching it above any comp title I can think of: the story of Julianna Ohlin, a poet from Iria who disappeared under not-dissimilar circumstances a few decades before the batch that bear this novel’s plot.

So Much Love isn’t a Gillian Flynn fling-your-fork-infear kind of crime fiction. It’s not a tea-bite breed of keen and patient reading like Miriam Toews might ask, either. It isn’t exactly a yield of the two, but So Much Love borrows a couple tablespoons from the recipe for both: something macabre in its undercurrent, enough to be unsettling, but the story tempered with a cerebral subplot that lets the mind a drift a little for relief. You wouldn’t call So Much Love thriller, but sometimes sharp insight draws interest in much the same manner as suspense, and here Rosenblum uses both to propel her story.

Catherine’s kidnapping and the things that come after are all drawn in loose complement to the poet Julianna, whose work and demise captivated Catherine before they became a chilling sketch of her own life in real time. Here Rosenblum writes an outsider’s view of an inside I suspect she knows well: the cold shell that can sometimes encircle a person swallowed up in good literature; someone living in the whale whose been taken by story so deeply in reading it that the world might mistake their cool gaze for anger or affront — but it’s the opposite, really, the rich company of characters consuming a reader so heartily that reality seems rather second to the point.

There’s a patience required, maybe too much at times, that flags Rosenblum’s pace — and it’s this, more than the story or the structure or the subject, that puts Rosenblum in a different category than Flynn; neither better nor worse, but rather want of a different reader. Nothing is given here, no character without a depth that’s cryptic if left uncontemplated, and that takes an audience girded by literary fiction to deal with. The mundane can feel urgent and clawing when daily tasks are cloaked by grief, a small-town portrait Rosenblum paints vividly, but the author is prone to linger in these scenes a little long for good pith.

There’s this thing said about literature that’s repeated without want, or attempt, at a better way to say it: show, don’t tell. It’s the opening line of most writing courses, a requisite bit for the syllabus and marginscrawl on many a first-draft, a phrase sneaking its way into some high school English classrooms here and there if the teacher’s in it for something a little more profound than pension.

Rosenblum does not tell — she shows. Gold star but go figure, I mean, I’m sure the author’s heard this phrase a few dozen times in the several professional degrees she’s amassed in this subject, but Rosenblum does something deeper, too. She doubles down on the showing in her word choice itself, each phrase ringing with — here’s another fun lit-class lesson — onomatopoeia, except better, because this isn’t sizzle or giggle or thump, it’s soup or pinch or cling — not quite your textbook takeaway of the concept, but better for their author’s reinterpretation. Rosenblum uses the definite denotation of a term to add texture and context; simple things like “breakfasts and naps and birthdays,” words otherwise relegated to kindergarten cue cards set here with such weight that they come to stand for love and marriage and life itself. So Much Love could say two things: love so much as to brim, or love just enough to bare — and the mystery of what lies between may just be the greatest of this book.

Rebecca Rosenblum