Female characters drive thriller
Nicole Baart’s latest thriller, “Little Broken Things,” begins with a cryptic exchange of texts between two estranged sisters in their 20s, and a scene in which the older of the two is cutting and dyeing the hair of a little girl, asking her what she would like her name to be.
The opening is irresistible, and the master plotter Baart keeps the secrets and mysteries coming in a way that, as one is resolved, another takes its place.
The novel is set in a sleepy lakeside town in Minnesota.
Nora, who has been in contact with her family only occasionally through the years, takes the girl to the lake cabin where younger sister Quinn has recently moved with her significant ■ “Little Broken Things” (Atria, 368 pages, $16) by Nicole Baart
other, an aspiring artist.
Nora tells Quinn that the girl is named Lucy and asks her sister to take care of Lucy and not tell anyone that the girl is there. Then Nora takes off.
Soon enough, the sisters’ widowed mother, Liz, discovers their secret, and a couple of outsiders begin sniffing around the town.
The men in the novel are plentiful but have little complexity. Some are sweetly good and helpful; others are horrifically evil; and still others, blandly neutral.
Part of the pleasure is figuring out which is which.
The ways in which Nora and Quinn have been shaped by their relationship and their pasts gradually evolve during the course of the novel, as their new situation changes them in subtle ways.
Tiffany, an old highschool friend of Nora’s — though present only occasionally — shapes the action at significant points and provides a counterpoint to the milder voices of the sisters.
Most compelling is mother Liz, who at first seems simply a caricature of the buttoned-up Minnesota mom, whose first answer to any crisis is to throw a party complete with “napkins (the nice thick ones)” and “vodka (cheap).”
Liz goes through the greatest journey as a character, and she is the one for whom readers’ feelings are likely to change the most.
Initially easy to despise or ridicule, she painfully endures internal changes that make her far more sympathetic.
With compassion, and without slowing down a rapidly moving plot, the novel examines what’s going on underneath the surface of a place that looks like “a slice of the American dream, right down to the stars and stripes hanging from an eagletopped flag pole attached to a pristine front porch.”