Of fractures and fragility: ‘When The Bough Breaks’

I spend a lot of time in bookstores. Most times I just browse, read a few blurbs, make mental notes of which books to buy next (when my budget allows it) and then leave. It was on one of these browsing sessions that I came across ‘When The Bough Breaks’. “Casey B Dolan may just be the South African Jodi Picoult…” the front cover read. An avid Picoult fan, my interested was automatically piqued. But I had my reservations.

Many books make claims in blurbs that they never live up to, so I chalked it up to good marketing and put the book back on the shelf. But a few days later, I was back and ‘When The Bough Breaks’ was back in my hand. Again, my scepticism won and the book stayed where it was.

But something about ‘When The Bough Breaks’ kept pulling me back and so, weeks after I saw it for the first time, mid-August saw me giving it a good home. Unlike with many of the new books I buy, I started reading it immediately. And I flew through it.

Wife to the ever-chipper Wade and mother to only child Tyler, Amber Whittington-Jones has, at first glance, the perfect life. But things are never as they seem, are they? Caught in a life punctuated by dreams deferred, feelings of inadequacy and an overwhelming and constant air of loss, Amber’s life goes from one extreme to the next.

If she’s not being ‘supermom’, smothering Tyler with all the love she can muster, she’s struck by bouts of depression so crippling that she goes through her days as if in a haze. But when Joshua Braxton Hartley steps into her world, Amber’s life takes a stomach-flipping turn – one that changes absolutely everything.

With a discontinuous narrative that jumps from present to past , ‘When The Bough Breaks’ has a story-line that touches on topics often only whispered about. Drenched in loss, family dysfunction, a taboo relationship and finding passion in the wrong places, ‘When The Bough Breaks’ is well and truly a page turner – easy to read and difficult to put down.

Dolan’s writing succeeds because her characters are flawed. Like all of us. A protagonist that is both a martyr and the villain, Amber is terribly difficult to like but almost impossible to hate. And this character complexity is what will win Dolan a large readership.

Bar the plot twist right at the end, once you get into it, ‘When the Bough Breaks’ is fairly predictable, but not disappointingly so. Once you catch onto what’s happening between Amber and the young, somewhat disturbingly intense Joshua, it’s like watching a car crash. You have a feeling about what’s coming and you don’t want it to happen, but you can’t tear your eyes away either.

Well-known in South Africa as an actress, presenter and FHM’s sexiest woman, Dolan has written her autobiography, ‘An Appetite for Peas’, but this is her first attempt at fiction. ‘When the Bough Breaks’ is available at CNA for N$199,90.

cindy@namibian.com.na

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