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    Sycamore: A Novel
    Sycamore: A Novel
    Sycamore: A Novel
    Audiobook11 hours

    Sycamore: A Novel

    Written by Bryn Chancellor

    Narrated by Cassandra Campbell, Steven Jay Cohen, Sara Morsey and

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    “In this masterful performance, Bryn Chancellor explores the loss around which an entire community has calcified with humanity and wisdom. Chancellor digs deep in these pages, unearthing broken hearts, secrets, betrayals, passion and—most impressively—grace. What a joy to find a book that is both propulsive and perfectly composed.”—Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, author of The Nest

    An award-winning writer makes her debut with this mesmerizing must-listen in the spirit of Everything I Never Told You and Olive Kitteridge.

    Out for a hike one scorching afternoon in Sycamore, Arizona, a newcomer to town stumbles across what appear to be human remains embedded in the wall of a dry desert ravine. As news of the discovery makes its way around town, Sycamore’s longtime residents fear the bones may belong to Jess Winters, the teenage girl who disappeared suddenly some eighteen years earlier, an unsolved mystery that has soaked into the porous rock of the town and haunted it ever since. In the days it takes the authorities to make an identification, the residents rekindle stories, rumors, and recollections both painful and poignant as they revisit Jess’s troubled history. In resurrecting the past, the people of Sycamore will find clarity, unexpected possibility, and a way forward for their lives.

    Skillfully interweaving multiple points of view, Bryn Chancellor knowingly maps the bloodlines of a community and the indelible characters at its heart—most notably Jess Winters, a thoughtful, promising adolescent poised on the threshold of adulthood. Evocative and atmospheric, Sycamore is a coming-of-age story, a mystery, and a moving exploration of the elemental forces that drive human nature—desire, loneliness, grief, love, forgiveness, and hope—as witnessed through the inhabitants of one small Arizona town. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMay 9, 2017
    ISBN9780062674036
    Author

    Bryn Chancellor

    Bryn Chancellor’s story collection When Are You Coming Home? (University of Nebraska Press) won a Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and her short fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, Blackbird, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Phoebe, and elsewhere. Other honors include the Poets & Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award in fiction, and literary fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the North Carolina Arts Council. She teaches at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

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    Reviews for Sycamore

    3.5/5

    56 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This book is one of countless I’ve read lately that have multiple narrators. However, this is one of the few that has done it well. The characters are memorable so you don’t spend the first half of their section trying to figure out who they are again. The story is compelling and the mystery at the center of the story isn’t the only thing holding it together. The characters are complex, with their own lives and problems, even as they focus on the missing girl. I really enjoyed this book, and look forward to more from the author.
    • 4/5
      I came very close to abandoning Sycamore by Bryn Chancellor but I stayed the course and eventually this over-written story drew me in and I had to read to the end to find out how the author would gather the various storylines together. The story basically explores the effect that the disappearance of a teenage girl has on a small Arizona town.In 1991, Jess Winters is a troubled teen, her parents have just divorced, her mother and she have moved to this small town and she is having a hard time adjusting and making friends. To escape her problems she often goes on late-night solo walks around town. One night she doesn’t return from her walk. The story then jumps ahead eighteen years to another newcomer to town who discovers human bones embedded in a desert ravine. While the whole town waits to see if these remains are indeed Jess the story jumps back and forth and we learn the backstory of many of the town’s residents which also helps to explain what happened to Jess. This is a story that was a little overloaded with secrets, guilt, and failure but the main problem I had was with the overly descriptive writing. Sentences like “The carbonized sky howled as the Milky Way cracked its sternum, exposing its galactic heart.” were rather difficult to swallow. Too bad, because the story was engrossing and the resolution to the complicated narrative was quite well done.
    • 5/5
      Sycamore, by Bryn Chancellor, is the type of book that will stay with you for a very long time. The story is as much about life in general as it is about the life of a girl who went missing when she was 17 years old.This is a mystery in the broad sense of the term. A girl went missing and no one knows what happened to her. That is pretty much by definition a mystery. If you're hoping for a procedural or a story that unfolds in the form of some type of investigation, this is not that book. If, however, you set aside the genre elements of so many mysteries and instead think of this as a mystery such as you find in life then you will be richly rewarded. The mystery does indeed get "solved" by the end, so unlike so many of life's mysteries this does come with an answer.While there are quite a few characters in the story they quickly get sorted out in your mind and as you skip from 1991 to 2009 and back you begin to get an intimate portrait of small town life and the individual lives of those there. The characters are richly textured and while you may find yourself identifying with one of them in particular you will also likely see shades of yourself in almost every person. By the end I cared about each and every character, even the ones I found least sympathetic. They are, like myself, human and they struggle daily with the dreams and realities of their lives.I would highly recommend this to all but those who simply like quick breezy reads that require little in the way of empathy or active engagement. I don't mean to imply this novel requires effort to read but rather that it will make you want to engage more closely with the people who inhabit the pages.Reviewed from a copy made available through Goodreads' First Reads.
    • 3/5
      I'm not sure what exactly to say about this book. It is obvious that many people just loved this novel, but for me it was a very difficult read.Yes this was a very literary, beautifully written and very deep novel and not something you would want to take on vacation to perk yourself up or to get lost in. The book does not really end well -or at least it doesn't end in any way other than the one which we already figured out right fro the beginning. As a matter of fact, in some ways it was a deeply disturbing novel - (this is a bit of a spoiler but needs to be said as it is missing from the synopsis) -there is a pedophilia aspect to this book that some will find...disconcerting? upsetting? contrived? brilliant? It was an interesting choice of the author to tackle something like this subject, but it is not the main crux of the book...it just seems to be that way since the topic is so controversial. I struggled to get at least half-way though and them at about 80% I just started skimming to find out for sure how this was going to conclude.My problems mostly stem from the fact that this book is told from so many different view points and the time frame switches back and forth from the year 1991 to the year 2009 (and I think we even did a horizontal time shift at one point. LOL).Another thing I had difficulties with is that most of the main character's seem to need heavy doses of anti-depressants and top notch psychiatrists - there was not a single person who didn't have some sort of angst problem, which for me made this a very depressing read. Yes, this is normal in any town -large or small, but it might have helped to have one person who doesn't go off the deep end, who can keep their cool even during the worst that life can dish out. I do understand that not everyone's lives are filled with sunshine and roses, so this is another reason why this book is going to be a hit. It really deals with real life in all of it's uncomfortable nakedness.For me, I need something that takes me away from the problem's in my life and being reminded for this many pages on how bad it is out there just made me more depressed than I usually am.*ARC supplied by publisher/and or author.
    • 4/5
      After her father leaves his family for another woman, Jesse and her mother, move from Phoenix to the small town of Sycamore. Jess has trouble making friends at first, so she walls at night to try to sort out her thoughts, come to terms with her different life, her loneliness and the loss of her father. Eventually she will make a new friend, Dani, and gets a job at the local pecan orchard. Unfortunately this life will implode in a big way when a secret is revealed, leaving a scandal and Jess once again friendless. Out walking again at night, exercising her grief, she will disappear, never to be seen again. Until a new woman come to town, a professor slated to teach at the local University, find some bones while she is out running.The books that seem to impact me the most, seem either to be darkly atmospheric, or unassuming and quiet, like this one. We hear from each of the characters, many whom still either live in the town or have returned. We learn how they have fared since Jesse has gone messing, how her mother has grieved. What people knew but didn't say, secrets revealed or kept, lies or incomplete truths told. We hear Jesse's back story from Jesse herself, a confused young woman who should have had her whole life ahead. A character driven novel but also a novel of a town, that dealt with the unknowable for many years. For some people the discovery of the bones will be an ending, but for a few it will be a new beginning. Although there is a mystery at the heart of this, it is in no way a thriller. It is a wonderfully written and ultimately a touching novel, of grieving, of moving forward and coming to terms with lives as they are now. Loved the town, the characters and the story, the author's debut. ARC from Harper publishers. Publishes May 9th.