eBook High Strung: A Novel download

This story moves fast. I find it good, but uneven. The narrative becomes engrossing when the main character tries to understand the relationship between her parents, but becomes unacceptably shallow when she gets into her own relationships. I think the writer tried to write for a cool chick audience when she should have stuck with her true interests and wholeheartedly written about leaving home. The sadness in this book is that if a loving home place ever existed, the main character Merle cannot find it again. The writer lets Merle off the hook of being uprooted; she tries to pair her off with a very unconvincing and cardboard boyfriend.

I bought High Strung on recommendation from a friend and loved it. I was totally taken with the narrator Merle Winslow's voice and her predicament--mainly, trying to reconnect with her father and brother after leaving them on bad terms ten years earlier and also trying to reconcile herself with how they, and she, have changed. I loved the pacing and humor of the story, especially how Dalton balanced that with the darker elements of Merle's past, like her mother's death in a car accident--which was also the starting point for the Winslow family's estrangement. The story moves back and forth between events that happened before Merle was born, which she gets in pieces from different family members, and the present events of her returning home and beginning a new life, and each storyline feeds the other. I loved it and I'm planning to check out Dalton's other book too.

Merle Winslow returns to the United States in quite a mess. She'd been living in London for 10 years, working as a copyeditor for X Publishing, an adult novel publishing company. Her boyfriend, Terence, was a sexual misfit who finally crossed the line when he asked Merle to "swing." Merle comes back to her hometown in Ohio, thinking she has left her problems behind her in England, but her family is just as messed up as Merle is. Her brother just lost his job and her father is about to marry a woman she has never met. And then there's Lettie, her 80-something grandma with a razor-sharp tongue. Maybe Merle should have stayed in London...?

I hated this book. It was drivel, which is an insult to actual drivel. The characters were not likeable, in the least. The plot, what there was of a plot, sucked and was stupid. I really want my money back, that's how much I disliked this novel. Stay far away.

More and more are we high strung, for the world inevitably closes in on us as it "gets smaller," as we're now fond of saying.  Quinn Dalton nails this condition with her character Merle and with Merle's surroundings, whether Ohio or London.  As life grows more hectic and uncertain, it necessarily becomes more comical, if we only allow ourselves to see the humor; Dalton possesses an innate gift for this, which she masterfully conveys through her prose.  After so many years of working side by side with her boyfriend in a pornography publishing house in London, Merle realizes that the life she has been leading cannot be hers: "I knew that I had to go home the day Terence told me about the swinging ferry.  It was 7:00 A.M. and he was leaning against my clinking radiator, which we were still using even though it was mid-April, the windows misted wet, Terence smoking one of his hashish cigarettes, eyes glassy, dark red hair wreathed in yellow smoke.  He was wearing his favorite turquoise ultrasuede trousers, silver-tipped Converses, and a gray jersey with a pink flower embroidered on the left breast."  While it would be wrong to disclose exactly what a swinging ferry is, we can peek at Merle's anxiety dream that night, in which she and Terence were driving up the street of her childhood home in America, "except we were driving up the wrong side of the road.  I was in the backseat, being chauffered by Terence, who turned full around to talk with me, ignoring oncoming traffic.  I ducked and screamed, waving at him to turn around.  And then the bugs appeared.  Big, brightly colored jelly bugs like my father's fishing lures, climbing the half-rolled-down windows, crawling in.  In his sleep, Terence turned over in my bed and brushed my shoulder, and I lurched sideways, whacking my head against the dresser."
Of course, since our lives are stories, threads often woven without our conscious assent, they also vibrate with all the other trappings Shakespeare would happily point out to us: political intrigue, placement (or displacement) in history, tragedy, humility, the grace to keep moving forward and discover meaning amidst chaos.  As a small plane's engine fails during a horse-sperm delivery, a marriage proposal is given as the narrator flashes to her mother's car-crash death and her father's maneuvering--when he was a child--the tractor that his own father lost control of as he was dying.  So many angles are taken into account in Dalton's novel, reminding us that we all play essential instruments in a cosmic symphony, essential even when some of these instruments happen to be high strung.

Seamus Heaney observes that "no matter how far we go we are really never more than a few steps from our beginning."

I dog-eared pages..."That was the way he was: unfaillingly concerned for the poor, the underrepresented, the lonely, but somehow tuned out from the people closest to him." A distanced heart--well, that is what Merle is doing, closing the distances that will kill us if we don't overcome them.

"...but of course I had just taken my old life with me, like an outfit that was ill-fitting and too revealing, but stuck to my back." We've been through three decades of moving on, from home, family, from one relationship to another when our needs or expectations aren't met...Merle's plucky if exhausted move from an emotional wasteland, her willingness to work from the center of her pain, her path on out beyond it, give us all hope that we might do better on the big issues of home, family, even and especially love.

"We had cheated ourselves with everything we had decided not to know." Ah.

The characters are wonderful--quirky, as funny and true-to-life as any maimed-but-making-it authentic grandmother, father, brother, or sister might be. The wedding reception scene is wonderful!

Dalton mines the energy that drives a good "mad" and delivers the lesson on the edgy humor that makes heartbreak bearable in the moment. Can't wait for the next offering!

Jessica Williams--Walkertown, NC