Rediscovered Reviews: 5 Masterful Books That Balance Plot and Prose

Young mother Nancy Harmon is desperately trying to put the horrors of her past behind her. Seven years earlier her two children had disappeared, a nightmare that continued when Nancy was put on trial for their murders and her first husband took his life in grief. Released on a technicality, Nancy fled to the quiet anonymity of Cape Cod and remarried. Surrounded by the warmth of her kind husband and their children, Nancy’s scars are healing—until her little boy and girl vanish.

A violent storm gathers along the coast as Nancy’s friends and neighbors identify her as the child killer sensationalized by the press. Under police scrutiny, Nancy’s mind begins to swim with memories of her first family’s macabre deaths. As a reader, your heart aches for Nancy, for her anguish as a mother and despair over the fresh accusations. Yet remarkably, Clark’s careful composition still allows for a shadow of doubt toward Nancy’s innocence.

Read more of Elizabeth’s review.

In this intimate and emotional family saga, 13-year-old Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, accompany their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a road trip to the Mississippi State Penitentiary, where Jojo and Kayla’s father is being released from prison. Thus far Leonie has been an inconsistent presence in her children’s lives, leaving their grandparents to raise them. Pop tries to teach Jojo how to be a man while Mam battles cancer. At the penitentiary, there is another 13-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all the ugly history of the South with him. He, too, has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, legacies, violence, and love.

SING, UNBURIED, SING deftly examines the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power—and limitations—of family bonds. Few writers possess Ward’s artfulness, and fewer still write about topics more relevant—justice and injustice, poverty, incarceration, racial profiling, family, drug abuse, faith, the limits and the limitlessness of love. Her incredibly skillful writing makes these topics digestible.

Read more of Taylor’s review.

After suffering a traumatic brain injury caused by an accident that he is legally prohibited from speaking about (and that he cannot remember), REMAINDER’S nameless narrator must relearn even the simplest of actions, leaving him with a stifling sense of his own inauthenticity. The £8.5 million settlement he receives does little to relieve his confusion. But when the sight of a uniquely shaped crack in a bathroom wall triggers a sudden memory, the narrator feels momentarily connected to reality in a way he thought he never would again.

Chasing this fleeting sensation of déjà vu, he puts his newfound wealth toward staging a series of increasingly involved “reenactments.” These reenactments range from mundane mimicry of daily life to dangerously vivid scenes of violence and murder. Participating in these staged events is the only way for him to act “fluently” and escape his sense that he is living several paces behind real life. The narrator soon grows addicted to the “intense and serene” tingling sensation he gets when reconstructing a memory. With his mental state deteriorating, his reenactments begin to spiral out of control. His final great reenactment irrevocably blurs the line between the theatrical and the actual, to disastrous effect.

Despite the ever-present backdrop of trauma and existential confusion, REMAINDER is a surprisingly easy read, cleverly sucking you into its own warped world. A psychological roller coaster punctuated with moments of unexpected empathy, REMAINDER is an uncannily profound glimpse into one man’s fragmented perception of (un)reality—one that is all the more disturbing because you may just recognize something of yourself in his dysfunctional mind. After all, as REMAINDER’s narrator knows all too well, “minds are versatile and wiley things.”

Read more of Emma’s review.

It’s short, barely 200 pages, but every word in this lovingly rendered portrait is as meticulously placed as paint on a porcelain miniature. The story follows Edward and Florence, a young English couple on their wedding night during the pre–Sexual Revolution 1960s. While a plot about the events leading up to the consummation of a marriage might sound limited in scope or even ludicrous, in McEwan’s masterful hands, it’s riveting.

Edward and Florence’s first night together becomes the turning point not just in their marriage but in their subsequent lives, and because McEwan makes this couple so real to us, we care—deeply. Any reader squeamish about delving into such a personal moment will find comfort in McEwan’s honesty, humor, and great affection for his characters. We come to know Edward and Florence as well as we know ourselves—maybe even better—and are eager to forgive them even when they can’t forgive themselves.

Read more of Lynn’s review.

High school senior Nadia has just lost her mother to suicide, and spends the days riding different buses all over her California coastal county to avoid her father’s grief at home. In this way she meets Luke, a pastor’s son who is waiting tables after a football injury devastated his plans for a sports career. Then there’s Aubrey, the pious teen saved by the very church Luke’s father oversees, who becomes friends with Nadia.

Death, injury, and spiritual salvation: each of these alone is a major turning point in anyone’s life. But Bennett takes these isolated events and brings them together at a crossroads with a single action that connects and forever changes all of her characters’ lives: Nadia’s painful decision to end her unwanted pregnancy.

As the years spiral away from this moment, Aubrey, Nadia, and Luke each grapple with what they truly want—and need—to fill the absence in their lives: ambition, education, family, love. It’s only when a family emergency brings the three together again do we see their real trauma is not the past, but learning to live with the past’s messy, unresolved hurt as a permanent part of their world.

Read more of Elizabeth’s review.