The Darkness that Divides Us

by Renate Dorrestein

Overview

Beautiful, happy people? No. Lucy is the most popular girl in the local elementary school of an idyllic Dutch housing estate. When a bizarre crime rocks her world and sends her mother to prison, Lucy is turned into an outcast and her childhood becomes an ordeal of constant, vicious bullying. After her mother’s release, Lucy’s family decides to escape and make a clean start on a rugged Scottish island. But even here, in this remote corner of the world, Lucy’s past holds a firm grip on her. Told in the alternating voices of the bullies and Lucy, this darkly atmospheric and emotionally gripping story is part family drama and part mystery. ‘A stunning mixture of many genres. The criminal story provides popular, psychological, folkloric, parodic, and psychological hints of secret codes to solve the murder case.’ AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW ‘Dorrestein knows how to chill her readers with tragedy and then melt their hearts with forgiveness.’ SUSAN VREELAND

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781642860337
Publisher:	World Editions
Publication date:	05/21/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

RENATE DORRESTEIN (1954-2018) is an internationally best-selling author who occupies a unique position within Dutch literature. An extraordinary storyteller, known for her unsentimental depiction of children and their flawed families, Dorrestein’s wicked humor offsets the darkness of her subjects. Her novels have been made into films and translated into 15 languages.

HESTER VELMANS was born in Amsterdam, but lived in five different countries while growing up, before finally settling in western Massachusetts. She is the author of the popular children’s books Isabel of the Whales and Jessaloup’s Song. The recipient of an NEA Translation Fellowship in 2014, she was previously awarded the Vondel Prize for her translation of Renate Dorrestein’s A Heart of Stone. Her most recent novel, Slipper, was published in April 2018.

Beautiful, happy people? No. Lucy is the most popular girl in the local elementary school of an idyllic Dutch housing estate. When a bizarre crime rocks her world and sends her mother to prison, Lucy is turned into an outcast and her childhood becomes an ordeal of constant, vicious bullying. After her mother’s release, Lucy’s family decides to escape and make a clean start on a rugged Scottish island. But even here, in this remote corner of the world, Lucy’s past holds a firm grip on her. Told in the alternating voices of the bullies and Lucy, this darkly atmospheric and emotionally gripping story is part family drama and part mystery. ‘A stunning mixture of many genres. The criminal story provides popular, psychological, folkloric, parodic, and psychological hints of secret codes to solve the murder case.’ AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW ‘Dorrestein knows how to chill her readers with tragedy and then melt their hearts with forgiveness.’ SUSAN VREELAND

Editorial Reviews

"Frighteningly clever. The haunting landscapes Dorrestein creates are as real as they are darkly fantastical." —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2019-03-04

A family's demise unfurls in the shadow of a mysterious murder.

Its first half narrated by a gang of bullies, renowned Dutch author Dorrestein's (A Crying Shame, 2011, etc.) brooding story begins in an outwardly utopian setting—a respectable Dutch housing estate where neat bamboo gardens are tended and traditional family roles are filled without objection. However, "in the sea of maternal bodies" that comprise the matriarchs of the neighborhood, one girl's mother stands out. "Gazing at her, you'd feel so happy and dreamy inside that you couldn't believe she could seriously be somebody's mother." Six-year-old Lucy and her mother live on the periphery of the estate—with two male lodgers named the Luducos—in a home where happiness is freely inhabited and not dictated by what's socially acceptable. As the kids in the neighborhood note in amazement, Lucy lives by her own rules. She "had sailed a pirate ship" and "spilled hundreds of glasses of orange squash, too, without any dire fallout." But the tides change when a new family arrives and the son becomes Lucy's boyfriend. When Lucy's mother wants to leave the neighborhood, a storm, both literal and figurative, rolls in, leaving the boy's father dead in its wake and Lucy's mother pegged as the murderer. Sworn to never talk about what happened, Lucy recites the lines she's fed about that night, leaving the particulars of the crime a mystery. From here, Dorrestein's idyllic town sheds its civilities to reveal a menacing portrait of domestic harmony disrupted. With her mother in prison, Lucy is left in the doting care of the Luducos. But at school, she resolutely suffers merciless bullying as atonement for her sins. While Dorrestein's writing is terrifically bleak at its best, the macabre is deployed shrewdly. When Lucy gains control of the narrative, moments of tenderness—like a heartening correspondence she maintains with her mother in jail—peek through. As Lucy fumbles through her adolescence, and eventually starts a new life with her family on a Scottish island far away, Dorrestein's tale becomes less a murder mystery and more a disquieting reflection on how people construct their own versions of the truth.

Frighteningly clever. The haunting landscapes Dorrestein creates are as real as they are darkly fantastical.

Kirkus Reviews