When a young girl goes missing in Little Hope, a tiny town populated mainly with the elderly, the entire town is effected in various ways. Most notably, Essie, the town's obituary writer. We follow Essie as she, and the rest of the town, become caught up in the kidnapping and the life of the little girl's mother. Questions begin popping up as to whether the kidnapping was completely made up...the ultimate hoax and Essie tries to figure out what it would mean to the town--and to herself-- if the girl was simply a figment of imagination.
A totally quirky read! I kept saying to myself how strange the story was and how I didn't have any idea what was going on, but it didn't matter. I wanted to keep reading and reading and I was determined to figure out what was truly happening in Little Hope.
Essie was a fantastic character, one that was strong-minded and quick to state her opinion, yet incredibly witty. I loved the inclusion of the young adult series of novels that keep everyone in the town reading (though they too were pretty strange) and wanting more books, and the concept of small town life was spot-on.
I would have to think about who to hand this book to. Definitely not someone looking for a clear-cut story, but rather a reader that likes to think and linger in the pages of their books. It's a great book for discussion, as my book club found out...we chatted for quite awhile about how quirky it was.
The Coffins of Little HopeTimothy Schaffert272 pagesAdult fictionUnbridled Books9781609530686April 2012 (paperback)Purchased copy
This morning
Shelf Awareness serves up this
quote of the day, and it stops me. I think I might just move on, but I can't.
Because Parks' assertion that reading the e-book frees us from "everything extraneous and distracting" ... "to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves" in no way jibes with my experience. Yes, I have downloaded dozens of books onto my iPad. Sadly, I've left many of them stranded. Unable to scribble in the margins, dog-ear the pages, underline emphatically—unable, in other words, to engage in a physical way with the text—I grew distracted, disinterested, bored. Yes, Michael Ondaatje will always keep me reading. And so will the work of my friend Kelly Simmons, and the words of Julie Otsuka, Leah Hager Cohen, A.S. King, Timothy Schaffert, Paula Fox, and Justin Torres—though I wish I owned all of that work on paper. But here on my iPad—stranded, unfinished—sit Jesmyn Ward's
Salvage the Bones, Andrew Winer's
The Marriage Artist, Margaret Drabble's complete short stories, and many other tales. These are, most likely, extremely good books, and yet, I find myself incapable of focusing on them in their e-format. I need to interact—physically—with the texts before me. I can't do that, in the ways I'd like to do that, with a screen.
I am also, as a footnote, intrigued by Tim Parks' final lines, when he speaks of moving on from illustrated children's books. With the rise of the graphic novel and the increasing insertion of images back into teen books (and I suspect we'll see that illustration encroachment continue), I wonder if we have really moved away from illustrated texts. I wonder, too, if we should. Art is not just for juveniles, after all.
Here is the quote at length, as excerpted by
Shelf Awareness."The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children's books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups."
--
Tim Parks in his post headlined "E-books Can't Burn" at the
New York Review of Books blog
These words from
The Washington Post's Ron Charles drew me to
The Coffins of Little Hope:
The Coffins of Little Hope is like an Edward Gorey cartoon stitched in pastel needlepoint. Its creepiness scurries along the edges of these heartwarming pages like some furry creature you keep convincing yourself you didn't see.
You're in, right? You want to know more? I bought the book, I got in and I stayed, from the very first line:
I still use a manual typewriter (a 1953 Underwood portable, in a robin's-egg blue) because the soft pip-pip-pip of the typing of keys on a computer keyboard doesn't quite fit with my sense of what writing sounds like.
.... to the last:
You were young only minutes ago.
Reading the pages in between was like watching the lights of a carnival go on—the hurly burly commotion of color, the hyperkinetic blink of possibility, the flavorful oddness of a
sui generis cast of characters. There's Essie Myles, an 83-year-old obituary writer for the local, small-town paper. There's the possible kidnapping of a possible daughter (yes, that's right, we never know for absolute certain if the kidnapped daughter is a scam or a true loss). There's the final installment of a famed young adult book that's being printed by Essie's press. Parts of that book get leaked (or
are those parts the real book?) Gentle weirdnesses come and go (but have they left forever?). These small-town people face all kinds of trouble (or they make it up), and Schaeffert can't say no to the sweet tangent.
It's a wild bob and weave. It's profoundly and preposterously well-imagined. There are lines here, plenty of them, that most writers would give their polished eye tooth to lay a claim to. Taken together,
Coffins is a delight—a book that you cannot wrangle with. Just let it happen to you. Stumble off, dazed.
Does this go in a Lovely Bones direction? Fairly dark, rape, etc.
Certain things are hinted about, but it's doesn't really go into being "dark." Plus, you don't really know whether or not the girl is even real...it was more quirky than dark.
Okay, thanks Amanda! It sounds really interesting and I'm looking for something different, just not something dark different. Requesting this at my library!