THE UNMAKING OF JUNE FARROW

Her grandmother’s death sends a North Carolina woman on a quest to discover the truth behind a family secret.

June Farrow has always known that the women in her family are cursed to succumb to “madness,” as they call it. It’s why she’s never let herself fall in love, and why she’ll never let herself become a mother. She’s determined to be the last of the Farrow line. After the death of her beloved grandmother, however, she has to come to terms with the fact that she’s been seeing things that aren’t there for the better part of a year. As the visions get worse, a letter her grandmother sent before her death with an impossible picture of June’s mother (who disappeared soon after June was born) sends June on a journey to investigate what truly happened to her mother and whether she has any hope of saving herself. The setup of this novel is engaging: a missing mother, a family curse, a small town with secrets. Unfortunately, the book is structured so that almost all of its biggest moments—all the reveals and climactic scenes—occur off-screen, with June discovering that they have happened rather than experiencing them herself. The same is true of the requisite romance: Due to the circumstances, June is dropped into a relationship that’s been going on for years though she has no memory of it, and all the falling-in-love segments are vague memories, rather than experiences depicted on the page. It’s hard to relate to a romance that’s told rather than shown. The mystery is intriguing, the characters fun, the prose well done, but the narrative is structured in a way that just doesn’t work.

An intriguing story with lackluster execution.