A review by scorpstar77
Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather by Jincy Willett

5.0

Wow. I picked this book up on sort of a whim, on recommendation from a book-a-day calendar given to me by a friend a few years ago. I was totally addicted once I started on it - I found it nearly impossible to put down. Our narrator is Dorcas Mather, fraternal twin of the story's other heroine, Abigail Mather. Abigail is currently in prison pending her trial for murdering her husband (he quite deserved it, we learn), and has in the meantime worked with an old acquaintance to write an expose of her life leading up to and including the abusive relationship and murder. We learn the whole story through Dorcas as she sits in the library where she's the head librarian and read the book cover-to-cover under the pretense of cataloging it (it's a new addition to the library), while she slowly gets drunk and rides out a hurricane. The story is darkly funny, and also a little tragic (though not necessarily for the reasons you'd think). It also strikes pretty true, because Willett spends time on developing her characters, flaws and assets and quirks and all. And so they seem real (she even has a moment in the story when Dorcas goes on a rant about how impossible it is for a novelist to create characters out of thin air who are just as real and crazy and unknowable as people in the real world, and yet the novelists who can do it are the only ones worth reading - hear hear!). I enjoyed the undertones of book-wormedness, and the crazy sister dynamic, and the just the pure fun of it.