A couple days after blogging about getting reacclimated to the sounds (or lack thereof) of falling asleep here in Missouri I received an ARC copy of The Weight of Blood by Laura McHugh. This is book loosely based on an event from a town that is a not insignificant part of my mental landscape. I know of Lebanon, MO principally for the first gas station you hit when you come in on the 5 from the north. The highway turns awkwardly at an intersection bending around this gas station. It’s usually my last gas stop on my way back here on the road trip from LA. (Where it would technically be the last gas station in town, as I’m headed back north. Directions, man.) It’s the town where I switch between the two hours of Missouri highways and the many, many hours of interstate driving on that road trip.

Henbane, Missouri is much smaller than Lebanon. Smaller still because it’s not real. It feels real, though, and was easily the strongest part of this novel. My sleep sounds thoughts in mind I laughed a little more because town where I live isn’t really all that small. It’s surrounded by smaller places like Henbane, places legitimately rural enough to have the kind of night music McHugh describes.

McHugh talks about the switch from roads that blast through the landscape, roads with rock walls on either side, to roads that hug the landscape. It’s a legitimate way to guess the population of the section of road you’re traveling. The farther you get from town centers, the more the roads ebb and flow with the land.

The major quoted reviews discuss the suspense of this novel and something about that word feels off to me. While the story’s central plot is one young woman investigating the disappearance of two others — disappearances with nearly twenty years between them — emphasizing the suspense masks something substantive about the way the story is told. It’s not that the story isn’t suspenseful, but that the setting is so strong a character that the story itself moves in a languid pace driven by that setting. The backwoods atmosphere is so alive that the novel moves with that same sort of drawl.

I loved that part of it. One of the novel’s main narrators has a life with tragedy so acute I certainly couldn’t begin to relate, but I empathized deeply with that feeling of being an outsider who is as eager to go as others seem eager to have gone. Even when you start multiplying population a bit, there’s something of that tight-knit small town ethos that carries.

The novel struggled a little with characterization. Characters often felt more like plot vehicles than fully-formed characters, which was a problem in this slow-moving story. That is to say, this might not have been as noticeable in a faster-moving story. I appreciated that pacing though; as I said, it felt in tune with the landscape which was beautifully formed. There was just some hollow characterization that could have been better developed in all that time. There were also a few instances of the dreaded “crooked smile” on more than on character.

On the whole, I enjoyed this book. In spite of the dark subject matter and characters who seemed to despise it, McHugh painted a lovely portrait of the landscape. There’s a subtle exploration of different kinds of familial relationships in there too, which was also a treat to read. I have a strong appreciation for any book whose setting becomes a character all its own. Bonus points in this case, for giving me new things to appreciate in the way it resembles my own surroundings.

I always hate giving grades or stars because I have no universal metric, no strict system by which I grade all things. It seems unfair to me — both applying a passionless system and deploying a lawless one. I opt to go with the latter, though. On Snark Squad we use letter grades and I’d probably give this a B. (Lorraine did, as well.) My goodreads review will be four stars. Take those scores as you will.

The Weight of Blood will be released on March 11th. You can learn more about it on the book’s official website.

If you’re interested in reading it, you’re in luck! In addition to supplying me with a copy of the book for review, Random House is also giving me an extra copy to give away. If you would like to receive a copy of this book, you can enter in three ways:

1. Leave a comment on this post.
2. Tweet a link to this post. Include my Twitter handle @SweeneySays and #TheWeightofBlood.
3. Share this post to Facebook, with this blog’s Facebook page tagged in the post.

You may do each option once. (That is, one comment entry, one Twitter entry, and/or one Facebook entry.) I’ll put everyone’s names on a spreadsheet and use a random number generator to choose a winner on March 11th.

Note: Random House is handling shipping for the free book and will only ship to US addresses.