Reservoir 13

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / McGregor, Jon	4-week checkout	Due 05-18-2024

A teenage girl has gone missing and everyone is called upon to join the search. The villagers fan out across the English moors as the police set up roadblocks and news reporters descend. Meanwhile, there is still work that must be done: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed. As the seasons unfold and the search for the missing girl goes on, there are those who leave the village and those who are pulled back; those who come together and those who break apart.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

5 Stars for Unconventional submitted by CarolSeidl on May 30, 2019, 9:22pm One of the best things I can say about this book is that it is different. It has relatively high ratings on Goodreads and is a favorite of one of my favorite authors, which is why I read it. There’s no question that it’s well-written and unique in its construction. I can see why literary aficionados might give it high praise. Yet, the story isn’t very compelling. The plot doesn’t take place in a particularly interesting setting or time period. There’s not much that you can learn from the book. There aren’t any climaxes and nothing much is resolved at the end. There are no paragraphs and no punctuation to indicate when a speaker has begun or finished speaking. The one thing I love about the book is that it ignores nearly every rule on which my kids’ English teachers have drilled them repeatedly for years and yet it has strong literary merit. In the end, if you are a student of writing, or you like reading things simply for the sake of contemplating unconventional prose, check it out. Jon McGregor is indeed a wonder. Otherwise, I don’t recommend.

Not what you expect submitted by amy on August 23, 2019, 1:51pm A girl disappears, but rather than settle into a conventional mystery with detectives and suspects, the story meanders through time, through lyrical descriptions of nature and the lives of the people of the nearby village. Observations are keen and intimate, but the narrative structure, with its lack of traditional paragraphs and punctuation, keeps the reader at a remove. The effect is something like the movie Wings of Desire, of the outsider looking in, a spirit observing from a nearby tree.