A Quilting of Scars – Review from Robin McBride

Thankful to @robinmcbride for this review:

I read @lucyemblack’s latest novel back in January, immersed in its late 19th-century rural world—in both the comforts of that earlier time and place, and the quiet horrors of societal strictures and buried traumas. The work centres on the character of Larkin Beattie, a farmer. He lives alone in the same house where he was raised, the only child of parents who were his friends, now long dead. It’s a house where essentially nothing has changed throughout Larkin’s fifty-plus years, except perhaps, for his willingness to examine the past. He is a haunted man.

The story takes place on a single day and night in 1909. Almost immediately, we travel back in time with Larkin as he reads old news clippings that tell the story of a house fire and double murder on a neighbouring farm, and of the trial that shook the community of Murton, not far from Collingwood, Ontario, in 1871.

But of course, the articles don’t tell the whole story.

I enjoyed reading this novel, my first by Lucy Black. Since A Quilting of Scars is a hybrid of literary and historical fiction, as well as a mystery, I was drawn in right away. I love suspense. As Black takes us seamlessly back and forth through time, we believe her main character and feel for him. Through Larkin’s distinctive voice and worldview, we get to know him. It seems like we’ve met this man before. In fact, Black dedicates her novel to “the Larkins of this world…” A detail that made me curious.