This is a book I requested off of NetGalley after seeing the rave reviews already posted and that it was being adapted into a television show for ABC. The synopsis really intrigued me, here it is from its Goodreads page:
Jacob was time out of sync, time more perfect than it had been. He was life the way it was supposed to be all those years ago. That’s what all the Returned were.
Harold and Lucille Hargrave’s lives have been both joyful and sorrowful in the decades since their only son, Jacob, died tragically at his eighth birthday party in 1966. In their old age they’ve settled comfortably into life without him, their wounds tempered through the grace of time … Until one day Jacob mysteriously appears on their doorstep—flesh and blood, their sweet, precocious child, still eight years old.
All over the world people’s loved ones are returning from beyond. No one knows how or why this is happening, whether it’s a miracle or a sign of the end. Not even Harold and Lucille can agree on whether the boy is real or a wondrous imitation, but one thing they know for sure: he’s their son. As chaos erupts around the globe, the newly reunited Hargrave family finds itself at the center of a community on the brink of collapse, forced to navigate a mysterious new reality and a conflict that threatens to unravel the very meaning of what it is to be human.
What I thought was most unique about this novel is that it straddles the line between horror and non-horror, something that is extremely difficult to do. I’m a horror fan but it’s really hard to recommend horror to anyone who doesn’t like it. After all, it’s call “genre fiction” for a reason, it’s so purely in one genre that if you don’t like it you just don’t like it. Jason Mott’s book is something else: I think that horror fans would enjoy it for its elements of suspense and intrigue at the dead returning to life and what that means for the small Southern town of Arcadia (think fans of The Walking Dead, for example) but because there’s very little violence and no guts non-fans of horror would also enjoy this novel. I honestly can’t think of any other book that I can say does this same thing.
I really liked the multiple-points-of-view style, it allows the central idea of The Returned to be explored in its entirety: from those who lost a parent, from those who lost a child, from Returned person themselves, and from those who are scared of the entire thing. It was a great choice by Mott as I think the story would’ve been stunted had it only been from one perspective. I did think that the storyline of the pastor was a bit underdeveloped and seem to end quickly and unexpectedly, but that could also be the author’s intention. It was the one that most intrigued me and so I was sad to see it go.
This book was a pleasure to read because you can feel how passionate the author is about the story and its characters. You can feel the emotion for yourself, the love and the labor that went into this book. And that translates into loving the story yourself; it’s always so easy to recommend a book that does this.
The book just came out TODAY! And you can buy it from Barnes and Noble here or Amazon here. You can also find the author on twitter here and on his official website here.
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