On the day after my mother’s death, I returned to 83 Beals Street for the first time in fifteen years. I had stolen something from there when I was almost nine years old and kept it long after my reasons for holding on to it had lot their urgency. I suppose it was one of many talismans, real and imagined, I began collecting around that age to help me believe that what I told myself just might be true.
Right away, the reader can assertively guess this is going to be a novel about mother/daughter relationships. Since the mother is recently diseased, it stands to reason that some revelations may becoming offering a clarity of the murky waters of such relationships. And then there is that stolen “talisman” that is cryptically held out as an enticement to read on. Just what did the narrator steal as a young girl? A solid opening in every respect regarding hooking readers in right from the outset.
I had tried and failed to save three of the people I most loved: two who, at very different times in my life and in very different ways, became the sort of friends we think we might never be able to live without, and then my mother, who in the end might have saved me.
Twenty pages later, the second chapter draws to a close on a cliffhanger, proving if nothing else the author has learned well the tricks of getting readers to keep turning pages. First, she lays out this mystery of the stolen “talisman” and throws something like this out as the concluding sentences of a chapter. It might be termed a lure or enticement in terms of stimulating reader interest, but in purely literary terms it is known by something more concrete and familiar: foreshadowing. Over the course of two chapters, the narrator has successfully foreshadowed a handful of revelations. If revelations do not eventually come and the mysteries of talisman and failures to save lives were never adequately explained, there is yet another term one can use: tease.
I shook my head, confused. I knew very little about the Shakespeare Society. I’d heard of it, but it was something that was kept quiet on campus, a place other students seemed to both respect and hold in mild suspicion, though I couldn’t remember anyone mentioning what went on there.
From this description, the Shakespeare Society—or “the Shakes” as it is know—sounds like one of those really profoundly stupid male-only bastions of Ivy League privilege like Skull and Bones. But this is Wellesley, not Yale and though there stupid secret rituals and a desire to project an image of something perhaps sinister, these are exuberant creative women, not male members of the Bush dynasty, Steven Mnuchin and William F. Buckley, Jr. Joining “the Shakes” has a profound effect upon Naomi’s maturation and development, but involves no ritualistic selling of her soul in order to becoming a member in good standing of the power elite. Plus, joining offers a chance to actually learn something about Shakespeare.
