See How Small: A Novel

by Scott Blackwood

Overview

A riveting novel about the aftermath of a brutal murder of three teenage girls, written in incantatory prose "that's as fine as any being written by an American author today" (Ben Fountain).

One late autumn evening in a Texas town, two strangers walk into an ice cream shop shortly before closing time. They bind up the three teenage girls who are working the counter, set fire to the shop, and disappear. See How Small tells the stories of the survivors -- family, witnesses, and suspects -- who must endure in the wake of atrocity. Justice remains elusive in their world, human connection tenuous.

Hovering above the aftermath of their deaths are the three girls. They watch over the town and make occasional visitations, trying to connect with and prod to life those they left behind. "See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart," they say. A master of compression and lyrical precision, Scott Blackwood has surpassed himself with this haunting, beautiful, and enormously powerful new novel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316373975
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	01/20/2015
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	545,578
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Scott Blackwood is the author of two previous books of fiction, In the Shadow of Our House and We Agreed to Meet Just Here, and the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award. He's also the Grammy Award-nominated author of The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, a two-volume narrative about American's greatest "race record" label and the rise of early jazz and blues. Blackwood resided in Austin, Texas, for many years and now lives in Chicago.

Editorial Reviews

09/01/2014
On an ordinary day in Austin, TX, Kate Ulrich's two teenage daughters and their friend are brutally murdered while closing up an ice cream shop. Five years after the still unsolved crime, the three girls are a collective "we"—visiting and observing Kate, their other parents, the man who found them, and witnesses. The stories of the victims and the traumatized survivors are told in nonlinear, dreamlike snatches—memories surfacing or vignettes from past and present. The girls float in and out of focus for the reader and the survivors, unable to break through the very thin barrier separating the living and the dead. The characters are compellingly troubled, but frequent shifts in perspective remind readers how little one can actually know about another person, whether they have a tragically short lifetime or not. VERDICT Similar on the surface to Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, this lyrical, abstract, and less sentimental novel by Blackwood (We Agreed to Meet Just Here; In the Shadow of Our House) about murdered teenage girls observing the living will probably not appeal to as wide an audience but may haunt literary fiction readers long after the unsettling ending. [One of Barbara Hoffert's "Writers To Watch," Prepub Alert, 7/14/14.]—Laurie Cavanaugh, Holmes P.L., Halifax, MA

Library Journal

Blackwood opts for a fragmented structure, telling the story in 60 short, elliptical chapters, largely from the perspectives of five characters…A vivid portrait of this Texas city, its families and marginalized citizens, effectively emerges through the rotating perspectives. Chapter by chapter, the reader learns about the investigation's many missteps and how these characters are adrift in their own versions of grief and bewilderment, each supplying further insight into that brutal yet enigmatic evening. Along the way, Blackwood captures the former small-town feel of Austin…during its stronger moments, See How Small compassionately examines the fragile psyches of the individuals left behind in the haunting wake of murder. Instead of a decisive close to a horrific crime, there is only remembrance; and in the case of this thought-provoking novel, remembrance fused with literary invention and at times even grace.

The New York Times Book Review - S. Kirk Walsh

★ 10/27/2014
Whiting Writers’ Award–winner Blackwood (We Agreed to Meet Just Here) has produced a genre-defying novel of powerful emotion, intrigue, and truth. From the opening pages, which artfully skirt from past to present, it’s clear that an atrocity has befallen Elizabeth, Zadie, and Meredith, the three teenage girls staffing the front counter at Sandra’s ice cream shop. Killers assault the girls, bind them, and set the building on fire. The merciless crime’s aftermath, affecting everyone in the Texas town—including devastated, revenge-consumed mother Kate, town firefighter Jack, and the arsonists themselves—forms the core of the story as each character’s life is detailed through the 60 brief, vividly realized chapters. As anniversaries of the murders pass, Blackwood resurrects the three young women on a ghostly plane. They populate Kate’s dreams, hang around town, and appear to the eccentric Hollis Finger, who may hold the key to solving the crime. Reminiscent of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and based on a similar, still-unsolved 1991 case in Austin, Tex., Blackwood explores the effects of senseless crime on an innocent, tightly knit community, using deft prose to mine the essence of human grief and compassion. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"Horrible deaths of the innocent, and the various means and tactics by which the living manage to go on in the aftermath of unsolved horror, form the heart of Scott Blackwood's haunted and haunting novel, See How Small. His prose is crisp and his narrative approach is fresh and inventive, calmly pushing forward, with characters rendered so convincingly you think about sending cards of condolence or calling with advice on the investigation."—Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter's Bone and The Maid's Version

"See How Small is superb. In prose that's as fine as any being written today, Scott Blackwood plumbs the depths of a story that is alternately haunting, terrifying, and achingly tragic. Blackwood illuminates the human condition even as he breaks our hearts."—Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

"Scott Blackwood is a wizard, and in See How Small he puts his skills to dazzling use as he anatomizes a town and a crime. Best of all is the deep empathy he brings to his characters, innocent and guilty, wise and confused; all of them are given the grace of his understanding. A vivid and astonishing novel."—Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy

"The novel has much to say about the mysteries of the human psyche, the far-reaching effects of violence, and the disparate ways grief works on people."—Booklist

"See How Small is the sort of book that is so good, it's difficult to even talk about it. You want to just place it in people's hands and say, 'Shhhhhhh, just slow down and read this.' Blackwood takes the most devastating story imaginable and lifts it-heart and soul-into something transcendent."—Peter Orner

"Similar...to Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, this lyrical, abstract, and less sentimental novel by Blackwood...may haunt literary fiction readers long after the unsettling ending."—Library Journal

"Emotionally layered."—Chicago Magazine

SEE HOW SMALL

"The greatest novels are somehow more than just novels. They challenge their readers and ferry them through madness toward unknown and undiscovered places.... See How Small is just such a book.... With beautiful language and sometimes surreal passages, [Blackwood] delves into the various characters connected to the deaths of the young women.... A tour de force. It is both epic and intimate."—William Jensen, Texas Books in Review

"A thoughtful portrait of a grieving town."—Joumana Khatib, New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

2014-10-23
The grisly deaths of three girls radiate across a community, which becomes as fragmented as this novel's impressionistic prose."The men with guns did things to us." The second novel by Blackwood (We Agreed To Meet Just Here, 2009, etc.) opens with a harrowing collective invocation by a trio of teenage girls working in an Austin ice cream shop, two of them sisters, who in a robbery, were bound and gagged with their underwear, then killed when the shop was burned down. In brief chapters thick with fire and ghost imagery, Blackwood alternates among a handful of men and women affected by the tragedy: Kate, the mother of two of the girls; Jack, a firefighter who entered the carnage; Hollis, an Iraq vet and witness; Rosa, a reporter; and Michael, the getaway driver for the killers. A more conventional novel might apply a worlds-in-collision template to these characters, emphasizing their shared experience. But Blackwood's style is much more slippery, and his characters' struggles are more particular and isolated. Michael's grip on reality slackens as his drug use increases and he struggles to keep custody of his daughter, while Hollis finds his PTSD triggers resurgent, and Kate cycles through relationships. The connective thread among them isn't so much the tragedy as the dour, vaguely symbolic experiences they have, from the portentous utterances of Michael's grandmother-in-law ("Are you from the planet of men?") to interludes in the voices of the dead girls themselves. The novel is strikingly creepy, if a bit affected—the brevity of the chapters and gauzy prose have a lyrical effect but also make the story feel diffuse, with no one peculiar, uncanny moment given the chance to build up a head of steam. Blackwood is an excellent stylist, though in the name of unconventionality, the reader lacks a few narrative toeholds.

Kirkus Reviews