Bowlaway

As if dropped from the sky, Bertha Truitt is found unconscious in Salford Cemetery with a bag beside her containing “one abandoned corset, one small bowling ball, one slender candlepin, and, under a false bottom, fifteen pounds of gold.” She awakes and quickly gets to work building a candlepin alley in town.

OK I guess. I mean I'm intrigued but it just can't sustain me for an entire book. At the sentence level McCracken absolutely slays, her writing feels turn of the century meets Tim Burton which works in small doses. In aggregate though it can totter to what repeatedly comes up as “twee” and I simply couldn't take a full-length novel of it. I think I would have enjoyed these more as a series of jewel-like short stories instead of the accumulated mass of it all that overwhelms like a flood of molasses. (A plot point here that actually did happen in real life.)

Frustratingly I tried to invest myself in Bertha but she passes the story on to others and we jump from character to character. It's as if McCracken is determined to avoid creating any resolution for any of her characters. Knock the pins down and they get set up again for another frame.