Black Flowers, White Lies by Yvonne Ventresca

Thad’s feeling of betrayal is sharp but brief when he finds out that Harlan is a revenue agent, stalking Dayman’s still, which literally explodes in his face. Blackwood knits characters together with threads of “moonshine”-not liquor, but a steady diet of stories, jokes, yarns, and outright lies’so that the story becomes a study in layers and varieties of honesty. Harlan is well-dressed, a free spender, and free with his time, too he allows Thad to use his fancy tackle to land a huge catfish, teaches him how to use a rifle, and even loans him clothes for a date. He begins to get a glimmer of other lives and possibilities when Harlan James comes to town, claiming to be a land scout for tobacco growers. Although he and his mother are dirt poor and he doesn’t remember his father, Thad is an optimist he has a girl, a loyal bluetick hound, and a good if risky source of income, selling corn liquor for Dayman, a sour, one-armed recluse with a hidden still.

The stereotypical depiction of sociopathy, that hoary trope, leaves a bad taste.īlackwood goes from Elizabethan England (Shakespeare Stealer, not reviewed, 1998) to a Depression-Era Ozarks setting for this poker-faced tale of a self-reliant but naive teenager. The lesson is that, at best, Blake, with his mental illness, cannot be incorporated into family life but needs to disappear, optimally of his own accord.

Does sociopathic Blake get away with his dastardliness toward his white (by inference) family? The author tries to build the suspense and empathy, but it falls flat due to the grating characterization of Ella herself-as well as the unkind characterization of sociopathy. If the incestuous undertones don’t creep readers out, Crystal Kite winner Ventresca ( Pandemic, 2014) ploddingly layers on Blake’s manipulations, from his constant gaslighting of Ella-with the participation of Ella’s best friend and the aforementioned love interest)-to bloody and muddy fingerprints on mirrors and walls and other, far nastier, deeds.

Fifteen-year-old Ariella Benton, nicknamed Ella, finds herself in Hoboken, New Jersey, at the mercy of her own ideas regarding her long-dead father, her mom’s new husband, her love for cats, a new love interest, a belief in the supernatural, and the stigma of mental illness.Īll of these story elements become a psychological-thriller Mobius strip with the appearance and then encroaching insinuation of the “tall and blond” “Beautiful Boy” she meets at the mall-and who turns out to be her future stepbrother, Blake.

Black Flowers, White Lies by Yvonne Ventresca