Sycamore audiobook

The little town of Sycamore struck her as something out of a fairy tale in its smallness, in its cluster of businesses along Main Street, its small college on one side, her new high school on the other. Though it seemed to emit a gentle sigh, a sleepy breath, she thought not of sweetness but of Frankenstein: “By the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open.” The girl, missing since 1991, has been found, well, her bones anyway. Her vanishing and the subsequent impact on friends, family, and the community is the core of Bryn Chancellor’s brilliant first novel, Sycamore. Reminiscent of Olive Kitteridge, Sycamore paints a portrait of a place, looks at the people who make up the town, and leads us through the mystery of what happened when seventeen-year-old Jess Winters went missing. The narrative skips back and forth between the now of 2009 and the then of 1991, when Jess vanished. Bryn Chancellor - from her site - photo by Rick WileyJessica and her mother, Maud, late from the departure of Mister Winters for younger climes, arrive in town looking to begin again, well Maud mostly, as Jess has not really had her first shot at life yet. Laura Drennan, on her own again, also late of a failed union, has taken a gig teaching at the local college. As Laura watched the Padres lose to the Giants again and picked at the dirt under her fingernails, it dawned on her that she and her parents were on a parallel path. All starting over. Except, of course, her parents’ do-over was part of a long-held plan—their fortieth anniversary was in two months. Hers was an attempt at an entire split from the past. Burn the whole fucking thing down and see if she could rise from the ashes. But Sycamore is not just a haven for the begin-agains, a Do-Over-stan spa in the desert, drawing the damaged. There are locals, generations deep, coping with their own dreams and disappointments, not necessarily in that order. Iris Overton, owner of Overton Orchards, is coping with the recent passing of her husband. Stevie Prentiss is helping run the family business instead of taking the art scholarship she so deserved, thanks to the passing of her father. Adam Newell, son of a famous artist mother, never quite had her talent, and is making a living selling real-estate instead of continuing what everyone had expected would be his family business, creating works for display at major museums, and coming up first on google searches. Esther Genoways is a caring, inspirational teacher, who finds herself alone again after her bff, a gay man, has moved west to marry a man he’d met on-line. The place could probably support an AA equivalent. I can relate, or at least I could once. “Hi. My name’s Will, and I’m starting over.” “Hi, Will.” If this is beginning to sound like a lonely hearts club, I apologize. Sycamore is so much more than that. I mean, would you take a pass on, say Anna Karenina, because it’s too sad? Speaking of Tolstoy, he famously wrote, in that very book, “All happy families are alike: each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.“ There is diversity in how the people of Sycamore face their challenges. Really, I mean if you want to read about happy families, dig up your copy of Little Women. Nothing against things working out, but harder, more challenged personal relationships seem to make the literary fires burn brighter than the softer glow of it’s all gonna be ok. Needless to say it is not all gonna be ok in Sycamore. I mean Winters isn’t coming back. Those are her bones, aren’t they? Bryn Chancellor sees the larger world in the small …stories always come to me first through that seemingly small scope of the everyday. There’s an assumption, even in the language itself—ordinary vs. extraordinary—that the ordinary doesn’t have the spark, that the value lies beyond, in the extra. I like to complicate that.  I don’t always know that I will find something extraordinary in the ordinary, but I always believe it’s there.  This finds its way into the story in a gripping Humanities class scene. Ms. G showed slides of the work, pausing on a painting called The Floor Planers, which showed three shirtless men on their knees scraping a wooden floor. This was scandalous, Ms. G said, not because they were shirtless but because they were workers. The Salon did not value depictions of ordinary life, working life. In their view this was not the subject of art. “But look at that light,” Ms. G said, and she touched the screen, tracing the shine on the floors, and on the men’s muscled backs. “Shivers!” she said, holding up her arm, and Jess got them, too. “The beautiful in the ordinary,” Ms. G said, and Jess wrote it down. The small is in the status of her characters, regular folks, for the most part, and, beautifully, in her depiction of the landscape. I grew up in northern Arizona, in a small town turned famous town: Sedona. There, with no transit save for the tourist trolley and parents who worked full time, I walked everywhere. To and from the school bus stop… walked at a slow, rock-kicking pace, cursing people for not giving me rides…I learned that I had to flee this beautiful place, my home, before it swallowed me whole. - from the story prize blogspot interview Chancellor may have fled her hometown, but her characters report on it’s harsh, majestic beauty. There are places like the erstwhile lake that vanished into a sinkhole one day, and seems eager to drag a bit more of the world, living and not, into its maw, (and, given the quote above, it would not seem too much a stretch to see the sinkhole that ate Sedona Sycamore as symbolic of Chancellor’s own fears of being sucked down into an inescapable dead end.) a baseball field that rings with the pings of diamond dreams, a motel with a looming backdrop that has to be holding at least some secrets, a mysterious woman who uses rocks as paint and a wheelbarrow for a brush in creating a large piece of installation art, at said erstwhile lake. There are ruts carved in the landscape from when the downpours were too great to be absorbed. There are atmospheric looming outcrops. There is the striking character of the landscape and there is the occasional ragged edge, whether composed of sandstone or flesh. There are heart fires ignited by the slightest touch, as if human skin had been soaked in sulphur and phosphrous. Some folks do get burned. There is the sere landscape with occasional oases where the verdant makes a stand, in the land and the people. There is a world of possibility, if only you dare to dream. She’d stood on a balcony naked and watched the sunrise while her new husband slept. Watching the shimmering expanse of the Gulf, she’d thought, There’s the whole wide world, and she stretched to her tiptoes, reaching for it. But have a care when you reach for the world. You never know what might reach back.There is much here about home, where it is, seeking it, finding it, making it. She walked in a land of strangers instead of in the land of her parents, her older brother and nephews, her colleagues and friends. her husband of eleven years. She walked in her alien landscape, in her ridiculous visor, and she told herself: Buck up, Drennan, you chicken shit. This ain’t summer camp. There was one particular reference in the book that blew me away, a few lines in the humanities class, from a poem by Edna St Vincent Milay. The poignancy is gut-wrenching, suspecting what we suspect, knowing what we know. And not just for it’s significance for a seventeen year old on the cusp of becoming. Maybe even more, it reaches my wrinkled soul, inserts claws and begins to shake. But the rain is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh Upon the glass and listen for reply. I have included the poem in it’s entirety in Extra Stuff, so you can see for yourself. Chancellor takes some chances with form, switching about from first to third person, and things like one chapter that consists of a letter from a father to his daughter, and another that offers one side of a conversation in a shop. I thought these were fun additions. The tale is told from diverse perspectives, each tale filling in pieces of others. It seems clear that the author is very comfortable with the short story format, has even won awards for her SS writing. In the way that Louise Erdrich, in The Plague of Doves, or Jennifer Haigh in Baker Towers weave together the lives of a community to tell a whole story, Chancellor has accomplished the same feat here, using the disappearance of a teen-age girl as a central pillar around which to construct the rest. Gripes. Parental/spousal abandonment, whether through divorce, death, or greener pastures, certainly permeates this novel, maybe a bit too much. It is the desert, after all, and one should be careful about dipping that bucket into the same well too many times. Chancellor might have diversified the forms of absence with, say, a prison sentence, or an early onset dementia, a prolonged military service, being held captive by aliens, (I mean, it is the southwest), something. I am not sure all will agree about the effectiveness of the alternate story-telling modes that are employed. I liked them, though. The author said, in the story prize interview, when asked what draws her in in a book I’m most drawn to works that have deeply complex, original characters in whom I’m absolutely invested. My mantra is “Come on, break my heart.” I want to feel something at the end, to go through the fire. If I’m weeping at 3 a.m. when I finally close the cover, success! She succeeds in generating that impact here. Have those hankies ready. Don’t finish this book in a public place unless you enjoy having strangers come over to ask if you are ok. This book will pull you in and keep you there until the course has been run, and you can look up once more. This desert landscape tale will leave clearly marked trails on your cheeks where salty water flowed. Chancellor’s first novel is heartfelt and powerful, human and universal. One can only hope that where Sycamore has now been planted, in the years ahead, a mighty forest of such beautiful novels will grow.Review First Posted - January 27, 2017Publication-----hardcover - May 9, 2017-----Trade Paperback - January 30, 2018 =============================EXTRA STUFFLinks to the author’s personal, and Twitter pages.She has sworn off FB for now as an impediment to actual writing. Interviews are from when she published her story collection——Heavy Feather Review - Stealing Breath: An Interview with Bryn Chancellor - by Erin Flanagan——From TSP, The official blog of The Story Prize - Bryn Chancellor and the Girl on the Wall - by Larry Dark“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why”BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAYWhat lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain Under my head till morning; but the rain Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh Upon the glass and listen for reply, And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain For unremembered lads that not again Will turn to me at midnight with a cry. Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, Yet knows its boughs more silent than before: I cannot say what loves have come and gone, I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more.OK, pass the tissues. Geez!

Within a minute I was hooked. The only way I could possibly satisfy my thirst was to drink this novel in one gulp. If I had read reviews in the pass- forgive me - but I honestly couldn’t remember anything about this novel. My library had the ebook available. I took a chance - went in 100% blind...knowing nothing about this story. The very first page HOOKS THE READER: “You Are Here” “Her first night in Sycamore, the girl snuck out of the house. Wearing frayed purple canvas shoes and a new puffy vinyl winter coat the red-orange of an ocotillo bloom, the girl paused on her tiptoes on the threshold when the front door hinges creaked. Her mother, deaf in her left ear, didn’t stir, and the girl shut the door with a click. This wasn’t the girl’s first time to slip out the door late at night, and it wouldn’t be her last.(There would be a last time, but not tonight). For now she had this night, her first in a small northern Arizona town where her mother had dragged her. She shoved her notebook inside her coat and hurried down the driveway. Her breath smoked in the desert winter air” This is a character driven story in a small town community.....flipping back and forth between 1991 and 2009. There is the mystery of a missing teen girl - Jess Winters - (J-Bird),but it’s more than that - it’s a story about people’s lives - multiple perspectives. The characters have distinct voices with distinct personalities and concerns. Themes include divorce- teenage awkwardness, confusion & identity- grief - loss - inappropriate relationships- regret - letting go of the past - outcasts -loneliness- friendships - friendships gone wrong- secrets - hopes - dreams -forgiveness - healing - and love. Personal side treasures I enjoyed: A small College town where people walk is always a great setting for me... but an even added plus was having a Mail delivery Woman as one of the key characters in this story. In small towns - the mailmen and mail-women have close relationships with the home owners. - They watch out for each other .... ( giving a box of chocolate to the mail delivery person during the Christmas season isn’t rare).... I love that!I also connected to Jess’s mother .... but this story mostly belongs to Jess.Oh - I felt for them both - mother & daughter. ... Jess’s dad was remarried with a baby girl in California. Her mother was sad -cried quietly while in her bed at night.Jess felt her mother’s pain (the divorce- moving to a new town - new job - finances tight - alone to raise ‘her’).All the while....Jess was dealing with her own challenges and pain at a new school.There is some lovely writing in this novel.......( gives Arizona a good name)... & beautiful poetry. Sad and beautiful!

A girl goes missing- for 18 years. A newcomer comes to town and finds her remains on a hike.This is the story of Jess. A teenager who relocated to the town of Sycamore, Arizona. A girl struggling with losing her father to another family and suffering from loneliness, the fitting in and the other woes of teenage angst. As her life is revealed, we realize an illicit love; a poet; rejection; a girl trying to find her place in a new town. And what we discover along with her remains, is a town of people whose lives have gone on hold and can only now move forward with the closure of her body being discovered. Relationships still raw but the healing can now begin. More a mystery than a thriller, this one started a little slow but then took off like a slingshot. A diverse cast of characters with their own stories and tragedies and how they fit into Jess's puzzle. Overall, although predictable towards the end, well written and surprisingly captivating. 4⭐️

Jess Winter and her mother moved to Sycamore after her father leaves them to begin a new family. Jess has a difficult time fitting in at Sycamore, especially when a new friendship with a girl at school, Dani, ends out of no where. Eventually she makes another friend but things there end badly too leading to a falling out. Jess can't sleep at night and ends up wandering around since they moved to Sycamore. Now that things have gotten even more tense with her, she ends up taking more walks and eventually on the night of a bad storm she disappears. Years later when a new person moves into Sycamore and stumbles onto bones on her morning run, Jess's case is brought back up and everyone holds their breath waiting to see if it's her body. The beginning of the book was really annoying to read and felt choppy but the more I kept reading the better it got and eventually I really got into the story. I love Jess and I loved her friendship Angie and I was so mad that (view spoiler)[ Angie's dad didn't just fuck off and leave her alone honestly Jess didn't even do anything and had to deal with the god damn fall out (hide spoiler)]. I was kind of disappointed about how Jess died but I guess it was pretty obvious. I guess it just felt like (view spoiler)[ all that dramatic stuff was pointless because she died of natural means and I was waiting for someone to murder her this whole time (hide spoiler)]. Anyway I really enjoyed this except the beginning and I could've done without the choppy transitions between POV and past versus present.

Sycamore by Bryn Chancellor is a 2017 Harper publication. 'Sycamore' is an oddly entrancing and incredibly absorbing tale centered around the lives of a small, Arizona community, and how the disappearance and spirit of seventeen year old, Jess Winters, has lingered over them, haunting them all these years, until a college professor, new to the community, discovers a body, sparking speculations that finally, after all these years, the truth will finally be revealed. The subject matter examined in this book is hardly new territory. Missing teen, tormented mother, the guilt of those who may or may not be involved in her disappearance, and the limbo, they all live in, wondering if Jess is dead, or if she ran away. Nevertheless, despite the familiar ground covered, the story still had a way of pulling me in, teasing and taunting me with bits of information until I was completely committed to finding out what happened to Jess Winters. However, as I walked further into the forest, it became more dense and murky, and I felt like things were moving in slow motion sometimes, but I still couldn't stop reading. The story flips back and forth between 1991 and 2009, as we introduced to Jess, find out her backstory, who she was involved with, and what way they were connected. In 2009, we learn how these people coped with the aftermath of her disappearance, and what eventually became of them. If you are looking for a traditional mystery, with detectives and interrogations, you won’t find that here, but there is most certainly a mystery, and the suspense is always humming in the background. Although, based on the tone of the novel, I had an inkling early on about how some things might play out, but couldn’t help but find the mystery compelling.However, this book goes beyond the ordinary mystery or suspense elements to take a hard look at how guilt, remorse, regret, and grief takes a long-term toll and wreaks havoc on people’s lives. The book also touches on how a community, despite its shame, and secrets, can pull together, heal, and forgive. Jess’s voice is powerful and emotive, by far the strongest one in the book, but I was also drawn to her mother, as well as a couple of other characters who seemed to have been more deeply and permanently shaped by the events that took place in 1991.Other secondary characters are well drawn, but their connection to the meat or the heart of the story seemed tenuous, at best, and at the end of the day, I wondered why they played such a prominent role.While the prose is lovely, the story feels disjointed at times, but overall, this is a deeply moving mystery, with a strong emphasis on healing and forgiveness in the face of insurmountable odds.

This is an accomplished debut novel. I suppose it could be described as suspense but it's really about the characters and how they are involved with a girl who goes missing in a small Arizona town. Interestingly, the story unfolds not only from the viewpoint of the people in the community but also from the missing girl's point of view sweeping back and forth between the late eighties and the present. Nicely nuanced.

'Sycamore' is that rarest of books, one that so absorbs the reader that it is difficult to come up for air. I found myself lost in Ms. Chancellor's words and story, loving her poetic narrative and fascinating characters. I dove into the novel and only regretted that I knew it would end.Jess Winters is seventeen when she disappears from the small northern Arizona town of Sycamore in 1991. Has she run off or is there foul play involved? It isn't until the present that an answer is found when some bones are discovered in a wash close to town. One might think that this book is a mystery but it is so much more than that. It is a novel about the interconnection of people and the sense of place evoked by love and home. It is about leaving and being left, of finding one's home in the mystery of life's offerings. Through the eyes of those who knew Jess and her family, this novel takes us into the heart of a creative and angst-ridden girl who is striving to find her way in life. Each chapter conveys a uniquely personal portrait of Jess through the eyes of someone who knew her. Jess comes alive in so many ways and as she entered my heart, I knew she'd never leave.I read over 100 books a year and it is rare that I encounter one as well-written, powerful, and unique as 'Sycamore'. Ms. Chancellor captures the depths of her characters, bringing them to life three-dimensionally. She inhabits them and I inhabited the novel. 'Sycamore' is a gift to the lover of literary fiction, a gift that comes along very rarely and is meant to be savored and shared with others. I will be telling all my reading friends, 'read this book' because it is amazing.

Jess Winters and her mother, Maud, arrive in the small town of Sycamore, Arizona hoping to start afresh: Maud is recently divorced from Jess' father and both are reeling from the event in different ways. Maud copes by sleeping most of the day away, but a restless teenage Jess wanders the town, searching for peace. Eventually she finds a friendship with Dani Newell, the local "smart kid" at the high school, and her boyfriend, Paul, the son of Jess' employer, Iris. Maybe, just maybe, Jess thinks, she could be happy here.Flash forward nearly twenty years, when a new resident to town, another restless spirit, stumbles upon some bones in the local dried up lake. Residents immediately fear they belong to Jess, who disappeared shortly before Christmas: a young seventeen-year-old who was never seen again. Oh, this is a magical book. I felt an immediate attachment to Jess from the first opening chapter. I was connected to her as a child of divorce, as someone who once had that urge to wander, who shared that restlessness as an adolescent. You quickly find that Chancellor has the power to create such real characters, who draw you in from the start. The book--and the story of Jess--unfolds in snatches and snippets of these characters. Each chapter is told by a different inhabitant of Sycamore, and we get reminiscences and memories of their past, telling more about what happened with Jess, as well as their current life. We also get chapters of Jess' time as a sixteen-and seventeen-year-old in the town. In a way, it is as if we are being caught up backwards sometimes. I was captivated by the oddly suspenseful way they each tell stories from different times and varying viewpoints. It's an interesting (and effective) technique. You are piecing together a mystery, yet also reading a beautiful novel of interwoven characters. One of the most amazing things about this novel is that for each different point of view, for each character, they have their own voice. Chancellor captures each one in their own unique way: the different way they speak. Some chapters are told in a distinctive sort of format and more. Every one has their own personality. It allows the characters--and the entire town--to really come to life so easily as you read. You can picture this entire small town and its inhabitants so clearly because of her beautiful, clear writing. It's just such a powerful book and so well-written. There's a sweet tenderness to this book that I cannot truly describe. It really touched me. It's not always an easy read, or a happy one, but it's a lovely book in many ways. It's wonderfully written, surprisingly suspenseful, and a heartbreaking but amazing journey. I highly recommend it. 4.5 stars. I received a copy of this novel from the publisher and Edelweiss (thank you!) in return for an unbiased review; it is available everywhere as of 05/09/2017. Blog ~ Twitter ~ Facebook ~ Google+

I almost gave up on this book because something happened without warning and I thought it was going to become a sleazy romance novel. But it was actually very relevant to the story and handled well by the author. There are a lot of characters and we hear from each point of view, so pay close attention when reading! I thought this was going to be a murder mystery but it is so much more than that! Thoughtful and poignant from beginning to end, this turned out to be one of my favorite recent books.

This debut novel by the writer is a heart-rending and tragic story about people who live in a small town in Arizona by the name of Sycamore (located not too far from Sedona). It begins in 1991 when Maud and daughter Jess Winters move to the town from Phoenix, after Maud's painful divorce from Jess' father. Maud has accepted a job with the postal service in order to support the two of them. Jess is almost 17 years old, and in her last year of high school. She doesn't seem to fit in well with most of the other students with a couple of notable exceptions. However in December of the same year, Jess disappears one stormy night and is never seen again. The book fast forwards twenty years when a new teacher has been hired at the community college, and on one of her exploratory walks around the local countryside, finds what appears to be a femur sticking out of the mud of an old sinkhole near one of the lakes. The book is written such that some chapters are recorded events of 1991, and others are twenty years in the future, after the bone is found. The story is told from the viewpoints of several of the people who live in the town. Like most anywhere else, several of the characters are deeply flawed, and they nearly all have secrets they do their best to keep hidden. How these people all fit into the disappearance of 17 year old Jess makes for a very tragic story, along with some moments of great kindness shown to others, including Jess, by some of the same people. I found the book to be a very good tale, showing the reader how even the most minimal event in one particular person's life can affect the lives of everyone else around them.

Neat mystery and character study of people and place in the new west. Reminds me of gone girl a bit. Ending is typical USA type happy ish conclusion. But nothing wrong with that I guess.

OMG. This book. Beautiful storytelling. Amazing characters. I want to read more about them. I haven't been this moved by a book in quite some time. Read it.