Starred review from June 15, 2009
In this unabashedly eccentric debut, a young couple with a troubled marriage make the fateful decision to summer in a decaying upstate New York house, leading to a series of bizarre events. First, their car slams into a wild boar, and Lily, seeing it squealing in pain, smashes its skull with a tire iron. But when the two arrive in town, they realize the boar—Sovereign of the Deep Wood—was the town mascot and the beloved pet of a nasty local named Skinner, who is eager to find the culprits. Then Duncan uncovers a gravestone and a human bone in the house's backyard, and the two barely speaking spouses excavate the skeleton and ponder a decades-old whodunit. Meanwhile, ad-man Duncan commutes back and forth to the city and struggles with a campaign that could make or break his career, while Ph.D.-thesis avoidant Lily befriends the town pervert. As the intrigues heighten to an absurd degree, the question of whether Duncan and Lily will reforge their bond in the midst of the macabre goings-on catapults the book to a surreally satisfying climax. It's fun, funny and touching—a great summer book.
Starred review from August 15, 2009
Manhattanites take up residence in the country, with dire results.
Lily's an academic; Duncan works in advertising. When she inherits an old house upstate, they decide to spend the summer there. It's a commonplace of modern fiction to make the city stand for artifice and jaded discontent and to equate the rustic with authenticity; first-time author Mauro does something like that here, but she does so without a shred of sentimentality. Those who enjoy sweet tales in which harried urbanites discover the simple joys of small-town life are given fair warning: The novel begins with Duncan crashing a car into a wild boar and Lily dispatching the doomed, bellowing creature with a tire iron. This hapless couple, it is immediately evident, will not be saved by fresh-baked pies and evenings on the porch swing. For one thing, their house is not an adorable country cottage or rough-hewn cabin, but a dangerously dilapidated Victorian. And their new neighbors aren't really the pie-baking type—more the gun-wielding type, occasionally brandishing torches. While Mauro is no more romantic about civilization than she is about nature—a onetime advertising executive herself, she offers a knowingly damning portrait of Duncan's profession—her delineation of people slipping into a kind of subhuman, pre-rational state is chilling. It's also frequently very funny and strangely moving, as is her depiction of the inability to communicate with each other that began the devolution of Duncan and Lily's marriage well before their journey upstate. Lily's friendship with the town pervert is similarly both comic and poignant. As the violent undercurrent that runs through this narrative erupts through the surface, readers will discover their own complicity in Lily's and Duncan's questionable actions. Mauro mirrors our animal selves back to us, and it's not a pretty sight.
A brave and accomplished debut: weird, disturbing and intensely engaging.
(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
July 15, 2009
The fine line separating human from beast is explored in this conventional, if oddly conceived, love story. The novel centers on Lily and Duncan, unhappily partnered Manhattan yuppies committed to spending at least part of their summer in upstate Osterhagen. Their first trip is marred by a freak accident caused by a boar bolting into their moving car. The wounded beast's cryindicative of tremendous sufferingprompts Lily to put it out of its misery with one swing of a tire iron. Shortly thereafter, the pair learns that the boar was the town mascot; worse, local residents are determined to bring the killer[s] to justice. It sounds zany, but it's not. Instead, the novel explores small-town secrets, the gender conflicts undergirding Lily and Duncan's unraveling relationship, and what it means to be loyal, principled, and honest. VERDICT While this material has been mined before and is reminiscent of Lauren Groff's superior "The Monsters of Templeton", the book will appeal to urban hipsters who favor happy endings and romantics who insist on believing that love really does conquer all.Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY
Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from August 1, 2009
Lily inherits a once grand, now dilapidated old house in a Hudson River Valley village. Shell live there all summer while finishing her dissertation. Her husband, Duncan, a Manhattan advertising guy, will drive up for long weekends. They imagine a pastoral idyll, but things get off to an inauspicious start when they run over a wild boar, which just happens to be the villages beloved mascot. They conceal the evidence of their accidental crime, but suspicions swirl. Then Lily finds a human bone in the garden. Their already imperiled marriage fissures as they succumb to outr' and bloodthirsty impulses in the face of noirish country madness. Lily finds an unlikely guru in Lloyd, a philosophical pervert stalking teenage girls at the library. He takes her on disquieting, voyeuristic adventures that awaken her to the aching strangeness of human life. Meanwhile, Duncan, fighting viciously to keep his job, designs a depraved ad campaign based on the Vietnam War. Debut novelist Mauro perfectly balances humor and soulfulness in this poisonously funny, torchlight eerie, psychologically astute tale of archaic instincts, deviance, and violence. A provocative tale of evolutionary short-circuits and the wildness that flows beneath civilizations flimsy veneer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)