Tethered: A Novel

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More About This Book

Overview

Clara Marsh is an undertaker who doesn’t believe in God. She spends her solitary life among the dead, preparing their last baths and bidding them farewell with a bouquet from her own garden. Her carefully structured life shifts when she discovers a neglected little girl, Trecie, playing in the funeral parlor, desperate for a friend.

It changes even more when Detective Mike Sullivan starts questioning her again about a body she prepared three years ago, an unidentified girl found murdered in a nearby strip of woods. Unclaimed by family, the community christened her Precious Doe. When Clara and Mike learn Trecie may be involved with the same people who killed Precious Doe, Clara must choose between the stead-fast existence of loneliness and the perils of binding one’s life to another.

From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Marilyn Stasio
There's a quiet, almost stealthy quality to the writing, so we become distinctly uneasy when Clara befriends a neglected, possibly abused child who has made the funeral home her sanctuary. Clara is an astonishing character, and with language as blunt as the death she sees every day, she expresses herself with devastating simplicity.
—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly

MacKinnon's debut offers an authentic view of an undertaker's job, but the passivity of her emotionally wounded heroinemay exasperate some readers. In Brockton,Mass., lonely Clara Marsh tends to the dead at Bartholomew Funeral Home, whose kindly owner reminds Clara of the undertaker she met as a child at her mother's funeral. When Trecie, a neglected little girl, begins hanging around the funeral parlor, Clara thinks nothing of it until a routine body pickup uncovers a stash of child pornography and Clara recognizes Trecie in a video. The ensuing investigation also points to Precious Doe, an unidentified child murdered three years earlier and whose grave Clara often visits in secret. Aided by a sensitive Irish cop, Det. Mike Sullivan, to whom she's attracted, Clara tries to unravel the mystery, even if that means confronting her own unpleasant past. Some affecting, understated prose only partially redeems the flat story line. (Aug.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
There's no end to the misery in this dispiriting first novel featuring a funeral home, a child predator and a parade of victims. Foremost among those victims is narrator Clara Marsh. When she was seven, her beloved mother was killed in a car crash. She went to live with her grandmother, a devout Catholic and avenging fury who called her daughter a whore for having so many lovers. (Some of them, like Clara's unknown father, were black.) Life became hell. In high school, Clara was seduced by a football player, then raped by a succession of his buddies. She gave birth to a stillborn baby. The final humiliation came when her grandmother cut off all her hair. We learn all this in retrospect. At the novel's opening, Clara is a young woman who has moved to a depressed blue-collar town in Massachusetts to work as an undertaker. Her boss Linus, a sweet, elderly black man, tries to be her surrogate father, but Clara cannot give or receive love, feeling herself tainted. Her hothouse flowers are her only refuge. Clara's most heartbreaking assignment at the funeral home had been preparing the body of a small girl found in the woods, her severed head discovered the next day in a trash bag hidden nearby. At the burial of her unclaimed corpse, the pastor named the dead child Precious Doe. Now another neglected little girl, Trecie, is hanging around the funeral home, craving affection. Trecie goes missing and is spotted in a kiddie-porn movie, and the cops swing into action as Clara continues retrieving her dead clients from their invariably squalid surroundings. Funeral routines give way to melodrama as the killer reveals himself. There will be two, almost three murders before the end, but Clara'sloveless condition remains essentially unchanged despite a one-night stand with the investigating detective. A more resourceful writer would have painted a less monochromatic world and offered her heroine some hope for change. Agent: Emma Sweeney/Emma Sweeney Agency

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780307409201
  • Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 8/11/2009
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Pages: 272
  • Sales rank: 835,903
  • Product dimensions: 5.18 (w) x 8.00 (h) x 0.58 (d)

Meet the Author

AMY MacKINNON is a former congressional aide whose commentaries have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, the Seattle Times, and on National Public Radio and This American Life. This is her first novel.

From the Hardcover edition.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

I plunge my thumb between the folds of the incision, then hook my forefinger deep into her neck. Unlike most of the bloodlines, which offer perfunctory resistance, the carotid artery doesn’t surrender itself willingly. Tethered between the heart and head, the sinewy tube is often weighted with years of plaque, thickening its resolve to stay. More so now that rigor mortis has settled deep within the old woman.

Each time I tug on that vessel, I think of my mother. I imagine other daughters are reminded of their dead parents whenever they hear the refrain from an old song, or feel the heft of a treasured bedtime story resting on their own child’s nightstand. My trigger is the transformation of a battered corpse back to someone familiar. I was too young when she died to remember her scent, and I have no memory of her voice. But her wake–like the accident–plays in my head like a movie reel, some frames taut and crisp, others brittle, fluttery things. Though always her face is clear: before, after, and then after again at the funeral.

I remember my grandmother’s friends clustered near the Easter lilies, whispering their doubts about my mother’s eternal salvation. My grandmother, her frayed black slip hanging just beyond the hem of her dress, bringing me to kneel on road-burned knees before the casket (don’t look!) and then hurrying me along, leaving me alone in the family room. I remember holding fast to my doll, a gift from one of my mother’s many boyfriends. He said he chose her because she resembled me. Even then I knew better. The doll was elegant and slight, with porcelain cheeks and delicate lashes, lips like my mother’s and eyes that clicked shut when I laid her beside me at night. She wore a red flamenco dress, gold earrings I once tried to pierce through my own lobes, and a parchment calling card tied to her wrist, her name in curvy script: Patrice. But what I remember best of all from that day was Mr. Mulrey, the undertaker. The mourners huddled in an adjoining room, their fingers clinging to rosary beads, their souls lashed to prayers, their drumbeat-chants vibrating within me. I ran from that room, desperate to escape, and rushed headlong into Mr. Mulrey. He was standing in the doorway of my mother’s room, filling it, appearing as bewildered as I felt. I clutched at his suit coat and he turned to me, hands worrying at his own set of beads. All of him stooped as if to avoid a raised hand: shoulders sunk, chin nearly resting on his chest, eyes buried deep beneath a low, dark brow meeting mine.

“I want to go home,” I said. I told him about my grandmother’s house, a place much like the funeral parlor with its heavy drapes and multitude of crucifixes, with long silences interrupted only by longer prayers. The way she pressed me to her bosom, suffocating with her old lady smell, vowing to protect me from my mother’s fate. I fingered the thick gauze that bound my head and asked if he’d take me to where my mother was.

He pocketed his beads then and folded my hand inside his enormous one. We walked away from the hum of mourners and stopped within a few feet of where my mother lay tucked in a lit alcove at the far end of the room. She appeared pink and rested. Her usual red lips were softened with the palest shade of coral, her pillowy bosom hidden beneath a lace collar. But there she was. With candles casting hypnotic shadows against my mother’s face, the room seemed kinder than the one I’d left earlier.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Mr. Mulrey, ushering me over to the coffin.

He allowed me to touch my mother for the first time since the accident. I stroked her hand, but it was hard and cold. So instead my fingers sought the fabric of her dress, knitting through her lace cuff as I spoke.

“I was sleeping when we crashed,” I said. “Then I was shaking her and shaking her, but she wouldn’t wake up.”

He let me go on like that; at least I don’t recall him telling me to hush. He simply knelt beside me, alongside my mother, listening. When I finished, he remained quiet.

“Mommy,” I whined, poking her arm, clutching Patrice to me, her doll’s eyes fluttering with each jostle. “I want to go home.” I wanted to sleep in my own bed, not in Grandma’s with her musty blankets and sharp toenails, with bedtime stories about mothers passing on to eternal damnation.

That’s when Mr. Mulrey again took my hand in his. “She’s dead.” He brushed aside a lovely curl that flipped over my mother’s brow where the worst gash had been to reveal the precise row of stitches he’d made with thread to match her flesh.

“Where’s all the blood?” I asked, but he misunderstood. I’d meant the blood that concealed her face in our final moments together as we lay in the street. He tugged open her collar to expose three neat stitches in her neck, telling me how he drained her blood from the carotid artery and replaced it with formaldehyde that then hardened inside of her. In spite of myself, I was awed by his ability to erase the wounds, to help me see my mother again.

I kissed my doll’s cheek and settled her against my mother, watching until Patrice’s eyes trembled closed. I almost snatched her back. I wanted to. Instead, I unraveled the calling card twined to her tiny wrist and hid it at the very bottom of my dress pocket. It would be the only memento I had of my mother. When I started to cry, fingering the three stitches (onetwo-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, breathe), Mr. Mulrey placed a hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Never mind what the others say. We’re all sinners and all sinners are welcomed by God.”

But I wasn’t comforted by a god who couldn’t give me back my mother; I found salvation in the undertaker who could. I suppose that’s why I became one.

Customer Reviews

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Sort by: Showing 1 – 17 of 16 Customer Reviews

  • Posted September 22, 2011

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    Tethered and Bound....We should all think in flower metaphors.

    Never thought melancholy could be written with such vibrance. There was a tenderness in monotone, each word written with a controlled careful thoughtfulness that gave a real insight into the main character and all she'd survived. Tethered's heroine Clara lives like she works, in a coffin, it takes a little dead girl to awakens some semblance of life within her. An exquisite corpse of characters, MacKinnon held nothing back, it was like she took them as delicate figurines and threw them against the wall shattering them for our appraisal. There's Clara infinitely wounded by her past abuse mirrored by the young mysterious girl, Trecie and her attachment to Clara, and the potential love interest, Detective Mike Sullivan who comes into the story completely broken. All of them shells of former promise, brilliant in their flawedness, come together and heal each other in this wonderful fusion of genres mystery, crime drama, and paranormal that really works in MacKinnon's capable hands. My favorite part, the flowers. I find Tethered like a Calla Lilly for its simplicity, form, and elegance. We should all think in flower metaphors.

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  • Posted June 27, 2011

    A hint of paranormal, a dash of mystery, lots of emotion. Loved it!!!

    I was caught up in the story right away. Every chapter had me feeling everything the main characters were going through. It was one of the best books I've read. The writing was excellent. The description and detail of the people and events made me feel and see the story so clearly, like a movie in my head. The last few chapters and surprise ending left me teary-eyed!

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  • Posted February 23, 2010

    great read

    I really enjoyed this book. It is dark but I was able to get through the themes easily because I enjoyed the story and writing so much.

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  • Posted February 15, 2010

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    Engrossing and Magical

    TETHERED is a novel written in prose that is both page-turning and poetic. What a feat. As a reader, I love being drawn into and learning about worlds of which I know nothing. Mackinnon provides gripping story and exquisite craft.

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  • Posted November 22, 2009

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    I Also Recommend:

    9780385302302 9780441017836

    A Tightly Written Suspense Novel

    MacKinnon strikes a wonderful balance between the main character's back story and the mystery of the novel. Both story lines keep you engaged till the end.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted October 28, 2009

    Amazing

    This was an amazing book. Once I started I couldn't put this book down. It is a powerful, emotional journey in the life of Clara Marsh, an undertaker without faith. I highly recommend this debut novel!!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted September 9, 2009

    A gripping but haunting book

    This was an amazing book that I couldn't put down. Although the subject matter was troubling, there was no way that I could not make it to the end. The characters are all well-developed and believable and the plot gives you enough information to lead you to believe you know what is going to happen, but in the end, you realize that you really didn't know. A great book.

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