After Lulu’s mother goes missing at the start of The Very Marrow of Our Bones, by Christine Higdon, nothing goes right for her or her siblings. Only Lulu Parsons knows that her mother wasn’t kidnapped or murdered. She knows that her mother couldn’t bear to live in poverty in a small town in British Columbia. She never tells anyone else and, while everyone else searches for Mrs. Parsons and hopes she will come back, all the Parsons children seems to lose their way. This novel tracks Lulu’s story and the story of Doris, a mute woman who sells eggs, moving back and forth in time from the early 1960s to the 1980s.
We meet Lulu on a very bad day. She is meeting her brother, who has been clean for a few months and is expecting a child with his latest girlfriend. He talks her into taking a ride on his motorcycle, but when she jerks at the wrong moment, they crash. Trevor is killed. Lulu’s mistake at this moment is like other mistakes she’s made in her past, which we get to see as a kind of cruel parade of events. Lulu never meant to do wrong. She just jerked at the wrong time and things went awry.
While the Parsons’ family drama takes up the most space in The Very Marrow of Our Bones, I was far more interested in Doris, the silent egg-seller. Both Doris and Lulu are molested by Mr. McFee, a creepy man with a knack for talking girls into things they shouldn’t do. Doris can laugh and, once, scream, but she doesn’t speak. And so people tell her things. She knows a lot more about what’s going on in little Fraser Arm—though she doesn’t know what really happened to Mrs. Parsons and Mrs. McFee, the other woman who went missing the day Mrs. Parsons ran away. I would happily have read a book just about Doris and her slow romance with the man who brought her books, her wild garden, and her quirky observations about everyone and everything.
The Very Marrow of Our Bones is an overstuffed novel, though I enjoyed the characters’ rich development. I think if this book had been about either Lulu or Doris, it would have been a lot better. I know that presenting us with both characters means we should compare them, to see how differently someone can respond to tragedy and trauma. But I think this comparison is unnecessary. In fact, I think it reduces two fully realized women into object lessons.
Aside from my issues with the inevitable comparison between the two female protagonists and the fact that there is so much packed into this story, I found The Very Marrow of Our Bones a fascinating look inside a very dysfunctional community and family. This book is perfect for readers who like drama stacked on top of drama in their fiction.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss, for review consideration. It will be released 3 April 2018.