Apparently Holly Throsby is a songwriter. It shows. Her sentences are peeled back, distilled to what is utterly necessary. Simple words say a lot. When the wife of local police detective is stomping around the kitchen, irritated and making lunches, “Simmons didn’t ask what was wrong. He didn’t offer to help her. He didn’t interact with his daughters or wash up his Weet-Bix bowl or his coffee mug. He left his pyjama pants and T-shirt on the floor of the bathroom, his used dental floss dangling over the side of the sink, and left for work.”
And that, so beautifully conveyed by Holly’s simple recitation of things Simmons did and didn’t do, tell us exactly what is Wrong With Her.
Two strangers arrive in the small town of Cedar Valley on the same day. The first, a distinguished looking man, sits down and dies out the front of the antique shop, evoking much alarm and curiosity on behalf of the locals. He has no identification and no money; just odd, old objects in his pockets, and a bus ticket. The police are left to solve the mystery of who he is and what caused his death.
On the same day, the oddly childlike 21 year old Benny Miller arrives in town to a generous welcome from her dead mother’s friend. Her presence reminds the locals of her mother, a controversial figure who lived there many years before and is more of an enigma to Benny than to many of the people in town. Needless to say, the stories of the two strangers are interlinked but it takes until the end of the book to find out how.
This book is destined to become a book club classic. It is so enjoyable and has much to say, in a quietly profound way, about masculinity and kindness and the concept of home and men and women and how we relate to one another, or fail to. The mystery elements are interesting but it’s a quiet pleasure to simply spend time with the people of Cedar Valley. Each character is so well drawn and believable; they come alive in the way they speak and move and sweat and the constant cups of tea and biscuits and fresh baked banana bread. We sense the humanity and the goodness in each of them.
I very much liked Throsby’s 2016 novel Goodwood, and Cedar Valley is just as well written. It stays in the mind long after you’ve finished it, like a lovely melody.
