Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As far as I can tell, Jayne Anne Phillips can do no wrong. Knowing that she had set out to write a novel based on a true crime, I expected a novel that would disconcert me in some fashion, but what she wrote was a complicated story about the disintegration of a family, the hardships faced by a single mother, and a journey to West Virginia that opens up another world inside the first one. Murder, discovery, and a crime that found a national audience. It’s almost inconceivable that the book works as well as it does, being split in half by the murder, with the story migrating from the family that died to the reporter who becomes bound to the story and tells it with all her heart. This is a novel of such sweep that any attempt to describe it falls short: the message you should get here is that Phillips can write anything, so just settle into this book and let it happen. No, it’s not entirely unified, but I didn’t care; she follows the story where it goes and gets carried away by it herself. The passage where Emily hires a near-abandoned child and slowly grows attached to him is a moment of pure light in the harder story that stands in the foreground. This was a really grand book to read. I felt I was seeing a different side of a writer whom I admire so very much.