{"id":1539,"date":"2015-02-26T11:57:03","date_gmt":"2015-02-26T18:57:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=1539"},"modified":"2015-02-26T11:58:15","modified_gmt":"2015-02-26T18:58:15","slug":"appearances-and-disappearances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=1539","title":{"rendered":"Appearances and disappearances"},"content":{"rendered":"

Take an ambitious, needy girl, throw in a few naive young men, add a plot for an improbable heist plus adventures on two continents, and you’ve got an impressive first novel.<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson<\/p>\n

UNBECOMING. By Rebecca Scherm. Read by Catherine Taber. Penguin Audio. 13 \u00bd hours; 11 CDs. $45. Also available in hardcover from Viking.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I sometimes wonder about the people who don\u2019t play by the rules \u2013 the scammers, the thieves, those who take advantage of others in one way or another. How do they justify themselves to themselves?<\/p>\n

In her intriguing first novel, Unbecoming<\/em>, Rebecca Scherm does a convincing job of taking us inside the mind of one of those people, and it\u2019s not a happy place to be.<\/p>\n

Grace, in her early 20s, lives in Paris. But it\u2019s not the glamorous life she dreamed of a few years ago. Having cut nearly all ties with her past in a small Tennessee town, she calls herself Julie and says tells the few people she deals with that she\u2019s from California. She works at a questionable antiques shop, mending and restoring odds and ends \u2013 pieces of china, family heirlooms, sometimes jewelry. She rents an inexpensive room from a disapproving woman. She has no friends, until she opens up a little to another woman who works at the shop. Whenever she can, she checks the website of the newspaper in her hometown of Garland.<\/p>\n

Deftly, Scherm takes us back and forth from this present to earlier times in Grace\u2019s life, times that helped to shape the person she is now. We learn about her troubled childhood, her early romance with a boy from a \u201cgood\u201d Garland family, her time at college and in an utterly unfamiliar art and social scene in New York City, her early days in Europe\u2026<\/p>\n

Grace is on edge because two young men who once were very close to her are about to be paroled from prison back home. The \u201cboys\u201d have spent three years behind bars, and Grace has spent three years trying to disappear. She knows a lot more than she should about their crime that went wrong, but no one has said anything about her involvement.<\/p>\n

Grace loves the objects she works with, and the ones she can find at markets around Paris. She loves them for themselves, not for what they might ever have meant to the people who once owned them. People are much more problematic.<\/p>\n

This is a fascinating story, and Catherine Taber\u2019s reading in the audio version brings the complexities of Grace\u2019s nature to life with believable poignancy.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, it\u2019s difficult to read a book when the main character is not someone with whom you\u2019d want to spend time. But through Scherm\u2019s skilled writing and Taber\u2019s haunting voice, Grace gets into your heart before she disappoints and even infuriates you \u2013 much as she does with other characters in the story. Our feelings for Grace change as often as does her sense of her own identity.<\/p>\n

I found myself half rooting for her to get away with it (to say what \u201cit\u201d is would be to tell too much), and half hoping she\u2019d get what she deserves.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Take an ambitious, needy girl, throw in a few naive young men, add a plot for an improbable heist plus adventures on two continents, and you’ve got an impressive first novel. Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson UNBECOMING. By Rebecca Scherm. Read by Catherine Taber. Penguin Audio. 13 \u00bd hours; 11 CDs. $45. Also available in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,7],"tags":[820,637,636],"class_list":["post-1539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio-books","category-contemporary-literary-fiction","tag-audio-books","tag-rebecca-scherm","tag-unbecoming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1539"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1542,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539\/revisions\/1542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}