What does it mean to like a book? Does it mean you find it compelling and want to keep reading it when you put it down? Does it mean you think it’s well-written? Does it mean that you connect with the characters and care about what happens to them? Does it mean you don’t want it to end? Does it mean you want to read it again? Or is it just something ineffable, unquantifiable, that marks the dividing line between “liked it” and “didn’t like it”? I can’t remember a book before Mr. Splitfoot that has so challenged me to think about what I mean when I say that I “like” a book. I’m still not sure, months after it’s been filed away as “read” on Goodreads, whether or not I liked it (I write the first draft of my review very quickly after finishing a book, but I do come back to make revisions a few times before anything officially goes up). That rating? Not a result of any sort of thought process besides that a six seemed too low, and an eight too high.
Mr. Splitfoot is structured as dual narratives that come together at the end. The first, earlier-in-time part of the story follows Ruth and Nat, two of many abandoned children at a state-funded, religiously-motivated facility in upstate New York that cares for them, sort of, until they turn 18. Ruth’s older sister Elinor has aged out, so she and Nat declare themselves sisters and bond to each other as their chosen family. As children, they start playing at summoning ghosts with the other kids, and once they reach their late teens, a traveling con man named Mr. Bell takes them and their act on the road. The second, later-in-time part of the story focuses on Cora, Ruth’s niece, in the present day. At 25, she’s living with her mother, working a dead-end job at an insurance company, and has just been knocked up by older man named Lord who’s still married to the wife that was institutionalized after she tried to kill him. Cora only met Ruth (and Nat) once, but that one visit stuck with the then-teenage Cora for life. When Ruth suddenly reappears, after Cora’s revelation of her pregnancy to Lord doesn’t go well, Cora is just about over everything in her life enough to follow the now-mute Ruth on a journey. Where they’re going, and why, and how Ruth came to be mute, are revealed only gradually over the course of the stories as they move forward…
Full review at: http://www.500booksblog.com/2016/03/book-16-mr-splitfoot.html
