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A review by moreadsbooks
The Kept by James Scott
2.0
Elspeth Howell returns to her secluded country home after months away to find her husband & children murdered. The only surviving child, Caleb, accidentally shoots his mother and then burns the house down attempting to cremate his deceased family. As soon as Elspeth feels well enough to travel, they set off on a surreal, feverish journey to try & avenge their family. They meet a few odd characters & at first things seem promising in an epic trek sort of way, but they get mired in the first town they visit. “Leaving had only occurred to Caleb in rare stretches of quiet . . . but he had always thought of Watersbridge as a transitional point: Either the murderers were there and they would kill them, or they weren’t and Caleb and Elspeth would try another town and another until they ran out of worlds.” This is what I had been expecting too, but instead, once in town, Elspeth disguises herself as a man & gets a job with a guy she met in a bar (and when Charles showed up, exactly how many pages were necessary before one could guess his role as tragic homosexual ? Less than one for this reader) and Caleb finds work of his own, sweeping floors at the whorehouse owned by charismatic bad guy London White. If there is one thing that I learned from Al Swearengen, it’s that a boy can always find work sweeping floors in a whorehouse.
It may not be this book’s fault that I didn’t much care for it, since I’ve started & then discarded no less than six books in the past two weeks (better luck next time, Book of the Crowman, and you too, Dreams of Gods & Monsters), so I may well be going through a phase. Actually, I think my real problem is that I just started working full-time again for the first time in four years & that’s broken my brain. So it could be that under different circumstances this book would not have left me as cold as it did. I can at least say (barely) that it has the dubious honor of being the only thing I’ve finished since my last Scudder book (which I read over a week ago, to my shame). I just wanted a lot more meat to the story of Elspeth’s family, especially in light of some big spoiler-y plot developments. The details that Scott gives were tantalizing enough at first, but in the end they proved too scant to keep me invested in the Howells & their woes. The big reveal of what was really going on with Elspeth and her kids was so grim & shocking, it deserved a lot more play than it got. I would’ve preferred to read two separate books here, one all about Elspeth & the terrible crimes she committed in order to have a family, and then another all about London White & the characters of the Elm Inn & the Brick & Feather and all the other denizens of the town of Watersbridge - but only if the second book had nothing at all to do with the Howells, since they were honestly the townsfolk I found the least interesting.
It may not be this book’s fault that I didn’t much care for it, since I’ve started & then discarded no less than six books in the past two weeks (better luck next time, Book of the Crowman, and you too, Dreams of Gods & Monsters), so I may well be going through a phase. Actually, I think my real problem is that I just started working full-time again for the first time in four years & that’s broken my brain. So it could be that under different circumstances this book would not have left me as cold as it did. I can at least say (barely) that it has the dubious honor of being the only thing I’ve finished since my last Scudder book (which I read over a week ago, to my shame). I just wanted a lot more meat to the story of Elspeth’s family, especially in light of some big spoiler-y plot developments. The details that Scott gives were tantalizing enough at first, but in the end they proved too scant to keep me invested in the Howells & their woes. The big reveal of what was really going on with Elspeth and her kids was so grim & shocking, it deserved a lot more play than it got. I would’ve preferred to read two separate books here, one all about Elspeth & the terrible crimes she committed in order to have a family, and then another all about London White & the characters of the Elm Inn & the Brick & Feather and all the other denizens of the town of Watersbridge - but only if the second book had nothing at all to do with the Howells, since they were honestly the townsfolk I found the least interesting.