MAY 2017 - AudioFile
Laura Brennan, newly arrived in the town of Sycamore, Arizona, is out for a run when she discovers what appear to be human bones embedded in an arroyo. Could they be the remains of 17-year-old Jess Winters, herself a new resident when she disappeared 18 years earlier? A talented cast of narrators pulls the listener into this small community as its residents uncover the connections between the past and the present. Slowly, inexorably, they peel back the layers to reveal the characters’ secrets—and how Jess’s disappearance has impacted all their lives. The steadily building tension keeps the listener riveted. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 03/20/2017
In this riveting first novel, 17-year-old Jess Winters, a recent transplant to Sycamore, Ariz., disappears one night in 1991, leaving behind a jagged hole in the community. Eighteen years later, Laura Drennan, a new professor at Sycamore College, goes hiking and accidentally discovers human bones in a dry streambed near the campus. Word quickly spreads, and the entire town wonders if Jess's remains have been discovered. As speculation runs high, we meet the former friends, classmates, neighbors, and teachers who continue to be haunted by Jess's absence. They include her still-grieving mother, Maud Winters; Angie Juarez, a high school friend who had an unrequited crush on Jess; Paul Overton, a classmate who can't forget his behavior at her last Thanksgiving dinner; Dani Newell, the best friend who felt betrayed by her; and Stevie Prentiss, an outcast with a secret. There are also flashbacks, which ultimately reveal what happened to Jess on that fatal night. This is a movingly written, multivoiced novel examining how one tragic circumstance can sow doubt about fundamental things; as one character succinctly asks, "Do we really know anyone?" The author ends her novel with a transporting vision of community, connection, and forgiveness. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (May)
Jill McCorkle
Bryn Chancellor’s compelling debut novel, Sycamore, weaves a suspenseful web around a small town in the years following a disappearance. With astute emotional and psychological observations, Chancellor successfully shows the power of the unknown as various individuals explore the many what ifs and imaginings of what really happened.
Kevin Wilson
Sycamore is an amazing showcase for Bryn Chancellor’s great talent, the way she allows each of the various characters to shine on their own, but connects them with such subtlety that their light forms a constellation that maps out the grief, the regrets, and the strength of an entire community. This is a powerful debut novel, one without flaw, and it will slay you.
Joy Castro
Bryn Chancellor’s Sycamore instantly reminded me of Tana French’s thrillers: a small, intertwined community, a long-ago crime, the tension and intrigue that won’t stop rippling....Chancellor writes gorgeously, and her story is riveting and real. I love it.
Tayari Jones
Bryn Chancellor explores the complexities of a small-town girlhood with insight and compassion. A page-turner and a heart-breaker, Sycamore marks the arrival of a shining new voice.
Claire Vaye Watkins
Haunting and elegiac, Bryn Chancellor’s Sycamore masterfully traces the fault lines of trauma and loss that resurface in the wake of a tragedy’s second coming. Chancellor’s multivocal narrative brims with intelligence and insight, and her subtle writing poignantly illuminates the ways in which we are sometimes bound, for better and for worse, by a collective sorrow.
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
In this masterful performance, Bryn Chancellor explores the loss around which an entire community has calcified with humanity and wisdom. Chancellor digs deep in these pages, unearthing broken hearts, secrets, betrayals, passion and—most impressively—grace. What a joy to find a book that is both propulsive and perfectly composed.
Booklist
A meaty, suspenseful debut.
Ron Carlson
In Sycamore, Bryn Chancellor writes young women so closely, so intimately—every rich corner of their lives-we see too clearly the dream that has captured them all: they think they have plenty of time. It’s troubling and tender. Underneath and above this town, the mystery of the girl who disappeared swirls everywhere and amplifies these lives, the hope and the love and the harm. This is a wonderful debut novel.
Library Journal
★ 04/15/2017
Chancellor's absorbing first novel begins quietly, quickly gains momentum, and ends explosively. Sixteen-year-old Jess Winters and her mother, Maud, arrive in the small desert town of Sycamore, AZ, in early 1991. Jess is lonely, with few school friends. She writes all her thoughts in a journal during her frequent walks into the desert night. Jess and Maud are close, but Jess is also fiercely independent. When she secretly agrees to a rendezvous with her friend Dani's father, Adam, the fallout during a Thanksgiving dinner among a gathering of friends ripples through the entire town. Jess swears that nothing happened, but she needs to get out into the desert and think. One dark rainy night, a few days before Christmas, she vanishes. The scandalous rumor and Jess's sudden disappearance ruin lives, and everyone resorts to finger pointing. Emotions simmer for the next 18 years, until a jogger discovers human remains in a wash near a trail. Shifting deftly between 1991 and 2009, Chancellor spins multiple threads of Jess's story as it affects everyone, especially Maud. VERDICT This gripping debut is a must for readers of literary fiction with an over-the-top final twist. [See Prepub Alert, 11/14/16.]—Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO
MAY 2017 - AudioFile
Laura Brennan, newly arrived in the town of Sycamore, Arizona, is out for a run when she discovers what appear to be human bones embedded in an arroyo. Could they be the remains of 17-year-old Jess Winters, herself a new resident when she disappeared 18 years earlier? A talented cast of narrators pulls the listener into this small community as its residents uncover the connections between the past and the present. Slowly, inexorably, they peel back the layers to reveal the characters’ secrets—and how Jess’s disappearance has impacted all their lives. The steadily building tension keeps the listener riveted. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2017-02-21
The disappearance of a teenage girl casts a pall over a small Arizona town in this debut novel.Jess Winters, tall and lovely and with a penchant for poetry, turns 17 shortly after moving from Phoenix to Sycamore with her mother, Maud. Her parents' marriage dissolved when her father took up with a younger woman—faithless men are a recurring motif here—and Jess is having a hard time adjusting to her changed circumstances. To let off steam, she goes on late-night solo walks around town. Eventually, a bright local girl named Dani Newell befriends her, but when Dani's father, Adam, takes a keen interest in Jess, disaster ensues. The story flips back and forth in time from 1991, when Jess goes missing, to 2009, when a newcomer to town—also fleeing a wayward husband—makes a discovery that may or may not explain what happened to Jess. As the narrative unfolds, we learn the back stories of different townspeople, which also shed light on Jess' fate. Though the author builds a fair amount of whodunit suspense, she clearly means for this to be a serious novel about loss, grieving, and forgiveness. Unfortunately, her writing—effortful and straining too hard for effect—often gets in the way: "Moments fractured into shards of color and smell and sound she strung together like a sad, crooked garland." It also leaves little to the imagination: "Jess Winters was their metaphor: loss, secrets, guilt, failure, embedded in one shining, curly-haired girl." And while Jess is a mostly sympathetic, well-drawn character, Sycamore's other denizens are not as vividly portrayed. Though the author comes up with a deft, plausible resolution to her complicated narrative, it's not enough to save this overwritten effort.
