Insta Review: One Came Home, by Amy Timberlake

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Sloooooooooow goooooooooing. In a throwback to last year’s inchworm of a novel The Green Glass Sea comes one of the most plodding historical mysteries I’ve ever made it through. One Came Home opens with a funeral for a mystery redhead that almost all of Placid, Wisconsin is convinced is Georgie’s sister, Agatha – except for Georgie herself. Agatha’s sudden disappearance, and the strange set of coincidences leading up to it – make no sense to Georgie, and she stubbornly refuses to accept that the body in that pine box belongs to Agatha without some proof. So Georgie, with an unlikley cast of characters, sets off to follow the trail that she thinks Agatha has taken. One Came Home has all of the pieces of a successful novel; mystery, suspense, action, character development, a strong narrative voice; and additionally, it takes place in an interesting historical time period. But the narrator’s voice is so distractingly strong, and the building of context so time consuming, that I didn’t enjoy it. One of my least favorite audiobook narrators provided the twangy, girly voice for this novel, which could be the reason it got under my skin so much. This might go over well with patient readers that enjoy historical fiction, but I can’t see One Came Home going mainstream with my readers. #bookreview #bookstagram #readersofinstagram

A post shared by Ms. Fitz (she/her) (@fitzbetweentheshelves) on Mar 17, 2018 at 9:49am PDT