Another book I devoured in a day while dealing with COVID (or whatever that was) is a YA thriller titled 'The Weight of Memory' that worked very nicely for me, even though it's hardly my genre of choice. The author is another one who's entirely new to me, but that's not too surprising, given that he works mostly in YA and wins lots of awards from Christianity Today. That shouldn't put anyone off, by the way. This is not preachy in any way and, while it does tell a story of family, it's an entirely secular one.

What impressed me first was how Smucker could enlist our sympathy for a character in what ought to be a completely manipulative way without it seeming remotely so. That character is Paul Elias, who has a tumour growing out of his head. The novel begins as a doctor gives him "anytime to three months" to live. He doesn't have long left, but he's got to deal with something before he can go and that's to find someone to take care of Pearl, whom he's bringing up as a single grandparent.

We don't know why this is so, but we will eventually learn much of it. He hasn't seen his son in a few years and doesn't expect to again. His wife left him forty years ago, albeit not in the way that suggests. I should underline that because it confused me for quite a while and there was no reason for it to. I don't recall if we ever learn who Pearl's mum is; she certainly isn't important to the story.

Paul's immediate response to this awful news is to go back home, to the small town he grew up in, which is named Nysa. He takes Pearl with him, of course, with the hopes he can find someone he can trust to take her on. So far so good, but Pearl is eerily OK with all this, because she suddenly knows all about Nysa for no apparent reason. She states that there's a white haired woman who hangs out and tells her things about Nysa and Grampy and what happened there when he was young.

Nobody else can see her, this woman, and we can't help but assume that she has to be a ghost and a rather knowledgeable one too, so we look forward to discovering who she really is. The only other thing we know early is that she's lost something and needs an assistant to recover it. What we haven't a clue. Where we haven't a clue. Who surely has to be Pearl, but we won't know how that'll pan out until we get to that point.

If the first hint that things aren't going to be remotely as simple as Paul might expect is this mysterious white haired ghost woman, then the second is a growing realisation that Nysa is dying, the reality of its present a long way adrift from the nostalgic haven of youth that he remembers so fondly. We learn that both from what we see when our intrepid duo get there and what we see in a succession of flashbacks, which unfold very much in Stephen King style, with a group of the best friends a man could ever have had.

Here, that's Paul, Tom, Shirley and May. Paul connects with May, who becomes his wife at a tender age. Tom connects with Shirley and they get together too. They spend their days out in the middle of nowhere, on the isolated farms they live on and especially at the cabin that Tom's family own on the lake but never use. And so we're all set. What's still to come is part thriller, part horror and part fantasy. It speaks to loss and guilt and memory and life and death, all of which are tangled together in a mess that the novel does a pretty good job of unravelling.

I liked Paul and I liked Pearl even more. There are supporting characters of note, but I couldn't connect to any of them as well as I could these two leads. What's odd is that I remember Paul as a character with depth and substance but Pearl mostly as a kind of living McGuffin. She's certainly the apple of Grampy's eye and he's obviously willing to do anything at all for her, down to giving his life. She's also certainly the primary focus of the mysterious white haired ghost lady, even if we don't know exactly why. She's like a key without a lock and we do wonder what value she would have without that elusive purpose.

I was surprised to find that Nysa doesn't become a character of its own, but the lake is pretty close to that; if the Tom's family's cabin had been more specifically memorable, I think it would have helped make the lake a bona fide character. As it was, the location of choice for me wasn't really either of them but the illusion of them that Paul keeps in his memory for the forty years he's been gone from them.

Smucker is clearly a very capable writer. Never mind setting scenes or plotting stories, he has other things totally down, like exactly how to steal our sympathy, how to veil an era in nostalgia without drenching it in brand names and how to make a precocious girl someone we want to protect. Sure, he has setting scenes and plotting stories down too but they're easy things to master compared to these other talents. In some ways, this novel passes more like a dream than an actual experience. It doesn't feel like it's real but it's true nonetheless.

Looking at his bibliography, this is clearly the standalone novel that I expected it to be, but there are other novels that look like they sit alongside it in theme and tone. Most recent is 'These Nameless Things' but there's also 'Light from Distant Stars' before it. Each of these appears to cover some of the same territory: trauma, memory, nostalgia and that old double bill of life and death. I may well pick those up at some point to see if they play as well as this one. ~~ Hal C F Astell