Finished this last night.
I first came across Mark Zero’s book on Amazon by accident. It’s mysterious and haunting book cover captured my attention enough to buy it. The first sentence of the book alone pulled me in enough to know I’d like this book and that reading it was no mistake. Mr. Zero definitely has a talent with words. His writing is like narrative poetry pulling you into a dream-like state. His vocabulary is quite impressive (or he just has a really good thesaurus). His characters are complicated and really come to life in your head, although at times I felt like he spent way too many pages in their head rather than moving the story along.
The entire synopsis of the book is quite short… Marnie Hawthorne’s grandmother, Dorothy, has died. Dorothy was the last living Hawthorne who ran the family’s vast chocolate business which is a huge asset to the small town of Templeton, Illinois. Everything has been left to Marnie though Marnie never even met Dorothy. She arrives in the gossipy town and takes up an affair with a young reporter named John Ridgely. John begins cheating on his longtime girlfriend of 4 years, Kate, who spends her time helping her parents with experimental farming. The relationship with Kate and John is quite boring on the page anyway, and things definitely heat up when John and Marnie get together.
Enter Jeremiah Grayson, the local barber, who had an affair a long time ago with Dorothy. So, Dorothy was cheating on her husband Robert, but Dorothy was also having an incestuous affair with her own brother Calvin. Throw in another oddity….Dorothy’s father killed himself on the steps of the local courthouse. This last part of the story seems important, but it’s only mentioned and never really discussed, as is a lot of these details that haunt the Hawthorne past.
As far as that goes, all of these events involving Dorothy are never really explored. They are just spelled out for you and mentioned over and over again. Most of the book is about John and Marnie, Marnie visiting the chocolate factory, the town gossiping about Marnie, Jeremiah lusting after Marnie because she reminds him of Dorothy, and Marnie walking through the house and garden slowly becoming just like Dorothy. It was rumored that Dorothy was crazy and cocooned herself in the mansion for the past ten years. Marnie begins dressing like her grandmother and her affair with John does echo her grandmother’s actions, but her psychological state seems fine.
When Marnie’s husband comes to town near the end of the book and discovers Marnie’s affair with John, only then does the reader start to see some real conflict amongst the characters, but the author comes up short as he quickly ushers the characters out of their storyline. In fact, there is more going on in the last 50 pages of the book than in the rest of it. Marnie and John are found out. John gets in trouble at his job. Kate finds out about the affair and she and John break up. Graham, Marnie’s husband, arrives in town and finds out about her affair. Jeremiah even begins to think that Calvin, the brother, is still alive because of the state of the beautiful gardens outside the Hawthorne mansion. Lots of excitement, but it takes 300 pages to get there.
Outside of the slow non-eventful start to this book, notice I’m still giving it 4 stars. I thoroughly enjoyed the Hawthorne saga that plays out, although it concentrates more on the current affairs rather than the past. I would have liked to have seen more of Dorothy, Robert, and Calvin, maybe in some flashbacks. Everything you know about them is really from current rumors being told or from what Marnie discovers in Dorothy’s papers. So, I thought the book could definitely use more of a historical aspect.
However, Mr. Zero definitely knows how to breathe life into his characters. Outside of boring Kate and her farming family, the rest of the characters were strong and well developed and I found them to be quite interesting and couldn’t wait to come home each evening and spend time learning about them. Be warned…this is not a light read. If you can appreciate beautiful storytelling and wonderfully descriptive images in a saga-like tale in a small Peyton Place like setting, then this book is definitely for you. Kudos to Mr. Zero; I look forward to more from him!
