She Treads Softly: Call Me Evie

Wednesday, February 20, 2019

Call Me Evie

Call Me Evie by JP Pomare
Penguin Random House: 3/5/19
eBook review copy; 368 pages
ISBN-13: 9780525538141

Call Me Evie by JP Pomare is a highly recommended twisty psychological thriller with an unreliable narrator.

Seventeen-year-old Kate Bennet is living in an isolated beach town in New Zealand with a man who she has to call Uncle Jim. He keeps telling her that he is trying to keep her safe; that the authorities are looking for her; that she needs to recover her memory and get better. She has been told that she did something terrible one night back home in Melbourne. She is to tell everyone that her name is Evie.

Chapters alternate before and after; between Kate's memories of her past, with events leading up to her current house imprisonment as "Evie," and her present situation in New Zealand. Her past memories seem like that of a normal teenager. There have been some difficulties in her life, but she seemed to be handling everything fine. Her present circumstances seem illogical and sketchy. Jim is giving her some prescribed drugs to help her feel better and recover her memories. She doesn't trust him, but doesn't remember the events he claims lead them to hide out here. He claims he is just trying to protect her and they don't want "them" to find her whereabouts. Kate is desperate to find out what she supposedly did and get home to Melbourne. At the same time, Jim's paranoia and furtiveness is growing.

This is a engrossing thriller that will hold your attention, if only to try and find out the truth behind Kate's tortured memory and her current weird imprisonment with Jim. Every character is unreliable in Call Me Evie so you aren't going to know who to trust. Kate's memory is fragile, but she seems like she is truthful. Jim seems sketchy, like he's hiding something, but he seems to want to protect Kate. Who can be trusted? Who is hiding the truth? What is the truth? When you reach the denouement, you will be shocked.

Call Me Evie is a well-written debut novel and certainly a page-turner, making Pomare a writer to watch. The before chapters will actually hold your attention and keep you reading in order to understand what has happened in the after chapters. The after chapters move a little slowly and are written to be vague, with a repetition of feelings and actions. Additionally, a case could be made that some of the information that is withhold until the end could have been slowly released earlier in the after chapters.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Penguin Random House.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.