The Glass Forest: A Novel

by Cynthia Swanson Narrated by Caitlin Davies, Jayme Mattler, Cassandra Campbell

Overview

The lives of three very different women intersect in shocking ways in this “outstanding psychological thriller” (Library Journal, starred review), by the New York Times bestselling author of The Bookseller.

In the autumn of 1960, Angie Glass is living an idyllic life in her Wisconsin hometown. At twenty-one, she's married to handsome, charming Paul, and has just given birth to a baby boy. But one phone call changes her life forever.

When Paul's niece, Ruby, tells them that her father, Henry, has committed suicide and her mother, Silja, has gone missing, the newlyweds drop everything to be by Ruby's side in the small upstate town of Stonekill, New York.

Angie thinks they're coming to the rescue of Paul's grief-stricken young niece, but seventeen-year-old Ruby, self-possessed and enigmatic, resists Angie's attempts to nurture her. While taking up residence in Henry and Silja's eerie, ultra-modern house on the edge of the woods, Angie discovers astonishing truths about the complicated Glass family. As she learns about Henry and Silja's spiraling relationship, and Ruby's role in keeping them together, and apart, Angie begins to question the very fabric of her own marriage.

As details of the past unfold and Ruby dissects her parents' state of affairs, the Glass women realize what they're capable of when it comes to love, secrets, and ultimate betrayal.

As turbulent and electrified as the period it's set in, The Glass Forest is an “intoxicating slow burn [that] builds to a conclusion rife with shocking reveals.” (Publishers Weekly)

Editorial Reviews

OCTOBER 2018 - AudioFile

Caitlin Davies, as Angie Glass, leads off the narration of this mystery, told from the perspective of three related women. Angie, who is enamored of her charming, older husband, insists on joining him to comfort his niece Ruby after the news arrives that his brother has killed himself and Ruby’s mother is missing. Through flashbacks, Davies and her fellow narrators—Jayme Mattler as Ruby and Cassandra Campbell as Ruby’s mother—reveal these women’s relationships with the Glass brothers and exactly what has led to this moment. Campbell and Mattler offer strong supporting performances, but Davies’s ungainly cadence is entirely out of step with the text. Consequently, her delivery of the plot’s revelations—predilections indulged and dangerous choices made—falls flat. K.W. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 11/20/2017
Swanson follows her bestselling debut, The Bookseller, with a stunning suspense novel set in 1960. According to 17-year-old Ruby Glass, her father, Henry, poisoned himself after her mother, Silja, walked out on them. Henry’s brother, Paul, and Paul’s new bride, Angie, travel to Stonekill, N.Y., with their infant son in order to settle Henry’s affairs and support their niece. Angie, who’s 21, can’t fathom how any woman could abandon her family and is determined to befriend and comfort Ruby, but Ruby keeps Angie at arm’s length and seems unexpectedly composed. When the police reveal that Henry may have been murdered, and the locals start telling sordid stories about him and his relatives, Angie does some digging and realizes how little she knows about the Glasses—including Paul. Swanson uses exquisitely rendered characters and an intricately woven plot to explore the cultural and political fallout of WWII, as well as the changing role and limited rights of women in the mid–20th century. This intoxicating slow burn builds to a conclusion rife with shocking reveals. Agent: Susanna Einstein, Einstein Literary Management. (Feb.)

Kate Moretti

The mystery in The Glass Forest is a solid whodunnit, but this novel is so much more. It's both an atmospheric suspense and a gripping multi-generational saga, all infused with the bleak desperation of the post-war era. Brazen and courageous heroines show, with unflinching honesty, the ugly sexism that could fester inside a mid-century marriage. A rich and unforgettable read!

Lynda Cohen Loigman

There is no safe place to turn and no one to trust in Cynthia Swanson’s stirring new thriller, The Glass Forest. Readers will be captivated by this haunting post-war tale of secrets, manipulation, and lost innocence. With a cast of utterly unique and fearless female characters, Swanson turns traditional family relationships upside down to reveal the darkness that lies beneath.

RT Book Reviews

A mesmerizing literary suspense novel set in the 1960s involving three women whose lives intersect over a tragedy. Each woman struggles to find her own identity, define her relationships and find a way to move beyond the limitations of the era and break the glass walls that surround her. A mixture of family saga and mystery, this novel delivers on both fronts.

Jillian Cantor

The Glass Forest is the story of three strong women in the 1960s, one of whom has disappeared. Part family saga, part mystery, part coming of age, this richly detailed historical novel is both a fascinating portrait of a woman’s life during this time and a meticulously plotted thriller. I absolutely devoured this gripping and beautifully written novel.

Kimberly McCreight

Richly atmospheric and beautifully detailed, The Glass Forest is a suspenseful literary tale of love and betrayal, marriage and motherhood that unfolds from the perspectives of three very different women during a unique time in history, which is as much about the secrets these women kept from each other, as it is about the truths they kept from themselves.

Booklist

A haunting novel.

Jessica Strawser

Atmospheric and unsettling, The Glass Forest depicts, with razor sharp edges, the walls we don't see until we find ourselves trapped within them—and the chilling, emotional panorama of the view from the inside looking out."

Booklist

A haunting novel.

OCTOBER 2018 - AudioFile

Caitlin Davies, as Angie Glass, leads off the narration of this mystery, told from the perspective of three related women. Angie, who is enamored of her charming, older husband, insists on joining him to comfort his niece Ruby after the news arrives that his brother has killed himself and Ruby’s mother is missing. Through flashbacks, Davies and her fellow narrators—Jayme Mattler as Ruby and Cassandra Campbell as Ruby’s mother—reveal these women’s relationships with the Glass brothers and exactly what has led to this moment. Campbell and Mattler offer strong supporting performances, but Davies’s ungainly cadence is entirely out of step with the text. Consequently, her delivery of the plot’s revelations—predilections indulged and dangerous choices made—falls flat. K.W. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2017-11-14
A young mother navigates the secrets her handsome husband seems to be hiding after his brother commits suicide in Swanson's (The Bookseller, 2015) second novel.It's 1960, and 21-year-old Angie Glass is deliriously happy with her handsome husband, Paul, and their 6-month-old son. Angie's idyllic Wisconsin existence is interrupted when she receives a phone call from Paul's 17-year-old niece, Ruby, who claims that her mother, Silja, is missing, and her father, Paul's brother, Henry, was found dead in the woods nearby. Angie insists on accompanying Paul to Ruby's home in Stonekill, New York, a modern glass structure that belies that darkness that has descended on the family. Ruby is not the emotional wreck Angie expected. In fact, she's not doing much talking at all, but she sure seems to be trying to play her Uncle Paul and Angie against each other. Mysteries abound: where exactly is Silja? Supposedly she left a note, but her whereabouts are a mystery, and who is the older man Ruby has been spending time with? Henry's death is officially ruled a suicide, but of course Swanson begins dropping hints early on that it might not be that simple, and nothing is what it seems. The story is told from the perspectives of Ruby, the Pollyannaish Angie, and Silja—but most of Silja's tale takes place in the 1940s and '50s after her quick courtship and marriage to Henry. Although the author does her best to capture the social upheaval and change in these time periods, especially in how the war changes Henry, the characters just aren't that interesting, and there's only so much a reader can take of Angie and Silja, and even young Ruby, enduring the controlling, moody Glass men…until they don't. By then, readers may not care.More soapy than suspenseful.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170947645
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	02/06/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The Glass Forest
Door County, Wisconsin 1960

The day started out clear and crisp—a perfect September morning with no foreboding of what was to come. After PJ woke from his nap, I bundled him into a sweater, stretchy knit pants, and a matching cap—hand-me-downs from my sister Dorrie’s children. Holding the baby against my hip, I stepped outside the cottage. It had rained the night before, and I breathed in the sultry fragrance, familiar as the scent of my own skin, of swollen lake water and sparse Wisconsin woods.

My feet crunched across our sand path over the unpaved road to North Bay; like all residents of North Bay Drive, Paul and I had created a path of sand across the gravel-and-oil road, to curtail oil sticking to our shoes. I made my way down the rickety wooden staircase to the bay, careful of the mud that always stuck to the stair treads after a hard rain. At the bottom, I squelched through the tall, mucky grasses to the edge of the water and with one hand turned over the lightweight canvas canoe my grandfather handcrafted decades ago. Over the weekend, Paul had fashioned a small wooden seat for PJ, padded and reclining, across the canoe’s middle bench. I was eager to try it out.

Humming softly, I fastened the baby with leather straps that Paul had hammered into each side of the bench. I was thinking about the night before. I remembered how rain had pelted the tin roof of the cottage, pounding into my ears as Paul and I rocked together in tangled sheets, our limbs entwined. At the end, I’d cried out Paul’s name, my voice raised above the sound of raindrops lashing against the windowpanes. Afterward we were still, listening to the occasional rumble of thunder as the storm moved eastward over Lake Michigan. Gratitude—for my marriage, my life, my future—wrapped itself around my heart as securely as Paul’s body encircled my own.

Now, twelve hours later, my breath caught at the memory. I paddled onto the bay, which PJ and I had to ourselves, save for a gathering of ducks floating serenely near the shore and a pair of gulls farther out. All the gnats and most of the mosquitoes were gone for the season. Only the occasional dragonfly buzzed over the water, its wings shimmering purple and blue in the sunlight.

I put up the paddle and let the canoe drift. Lulled by the gently rocking craft, PJ babbled cheerfully as he watched birds flying overhead.

I looked up, shielding my eyes from the sun, and as I did, a burst of splashing water erupted to my right. I whipped my head and shoulders around in time to see a trout shooting out of the bay, sending ripples across the surface when it plunged back in.

Pulled off balance by my sudden shift, I felt the canoe tipping sharply. PJ let out a wail. I twisted and saw the baby roll to the side and the top of his head touch the water. His shoulders and torso followed. The leather straps had come loose from the bench—Paul must not have hammered them in securely enough.

I grappled forward and snatched the baby by his ankles just before he went fully underwater. The canoe tilted and I sat down hastily, grinding my hip into the bench as I restored myself upright.

The baby wailed with surprise, his hair soaked, lake water dripping into his eyes and mingling with his tears. I hugged him to my chest and ran my fingers across his drenched head. “It’s okay, my little one,” I murmured. “You’re safe.”

I kissed PJ’s brow, tucking his head against my breast, and with my free hand crossed myself. Thank you, Virgin Mother, I silently prayed. Thank you for watching over us.

The wooden paddle drifted nearby. Shaking, I stared at it. I snuggled the baby under my left arm, dunked my right forearm into the water, and propelled the canoe by hand until I reached the paddle. I retrieved it and tucked the baby more tightly against my body. Awkwardly, one-handed, I paddled toward the shore—graceless but steadfast.

• • •

I was just walking in the door when the telephone began to ring—the two short rings signifying the call coming over the party line was for my household. Still trembling, I slipped off my muddy galoshes. I dashed to the bathroom, wrapped the baby in a towel, and placed him on the davenport.

I crossed the cottage’s diminutive living room and picked up the telephone receiver on the desk, turning down the radio volume with my other hand; I’d neglected to shut off the radio before I went out on the bay. Throughout the morning on WDOR, the announcers had been discussing last night’s presidential debate. They said that while Vice President Nixon came off favorably over the airwaves, those who’d watched the televised version felt Senator Kennedy won by a landslide. The first time I heard those words, earlier that morning, I’d raised my fist in a little cheer. In less than two months, I would be voting in my first presidential election. The senator from Massachusetts had my full support.

“Aunt Angie?” The female voice on the other end of the line was unfamiliar. I have more than a dozen nieces and nephews—I’m the youngest of six, and all my siblings have several children apiece—but only a handful of those children were old enough to make telephone calls. And of those few, none had a mature voice like this. Not quite the intonation of an adult, but surely not a child, either.

Only one person might call me aunt in that type of voice.

“Ruby?” I asked. “Is that you? Are you all right?”

There was no answer. I glanced across the room, watching PJ burble to himself as he swatted the loose threads on a sofa pillow. Considering what he’d been through on the bay, PJ was terrifically calm. How lucky I was to have such an agreeable baby, when all I heard from my sisters and sisters-in-law were gripes about colic and crankiness.

“We got us a winner,” Paul said whenever I marveled at this. “The boy’s a winner, Angel.”

And I would smile, both at his words and his pet name for me. Angel.

There was an almost inaudible sound on the line—not spoken words and not quite the clearing of a throat. I hoped it was Ruby, but I suspected it was old Mrs. Bates from down the road, using the party line to snare gossip like catching a weasel in a baited live trap.

“Ruby?” I said again. “Are you there? Are you all right?”

“No,” Ruby answered in that restrained voice of hers, devoid of emotion and cool as the water in the bay. “No, Aunt Angie, I am not all right.”

There was another pause, and then Ruby said, “Aunt Angie, my father is dead. And my mother has run away.”

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