Customer Reviews

Child's Play

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This is perhaps one of the most frustrating novels I have ever read. The premise was attractive, the idea of a child capable of heinous acts and a parent's dilemma in facing the truth. A 1950s movie comes to mind, although this novel is set in Spain. Luisa, a successful author, and her eleven-year-old daughter, Elba, have a somewhat contentious relationship, the daughter entering that phase where mothers are either malleable or not to be trusted. With feelings of guilt for a botched explanation of Elba's parentage, Luisa can't decide whether to be honest with Elba or become further trapped in the deceits she has spun thus far. The result is a purgatory of unresolved emotions.

Yet this lack of clarity serves Luisa's purpose, and the protagonist she is creating in her new novel, to temporize and ruminate about the truth vs. the fantasy that absorbs most of the woman's waking hours. Hiding behind her identity as a writer, Luisa appears constitutionally incapable of speaking honestly or following a rational thought. Instead, she is indulges in stream-of-consciousness ramblings that mix fact and fiction, idealization with fragments that never quite make a whole. Either this tale is genius or an exercise in self-indulgence masquerading as a novel. It takes good deal of tedious slogging through Luisa's imagination to get to the heart of the matter. Easier to have skipped to the final pages.

The facts are curious: four children, one dies suddenly, a twin boy. The survivors of this traumatic incident meet again unexpectedly as adults with their children and the scenario plays out again. In each case, a child is dead. Who is to blame? And rather than build a cogent story, the author drags the readers through Luisa's cluttered mind- therein the genius or the foolishness. For it is necessary to endure Luisa's endless ruminations to get to the crux of her concerns, an exercise that will be thrilling to some, torture to others.

Stream-of-consciousness writing is not for the faint of heart and I discover, not for the first time, that the reward is insufficient for the mental acrobatics required in navigating Luisa's real life vs. her alter ego, Carmen, in the book she is writing. Surely there is a fine line between these worlds. But to be technical, the plot device of novel-in-process and life is not borne out and simply becomes a ploy. The deeper into Luisa's consciousness I get, the less justification for a parallel plot. I sense a sophisticated, brilliant novelist at work, but have not the endurance to appreciate the subtleties of this particular challenge. Luan Gaines/2009.

There is a private school in Madrid where children learn reading, writing and murder. Best-selling mystery author Luisa Dávila has enrolled her twelve-year-old daughter Elba into the same private school she attended forty years earlier. This school is the setting for her latest novel in which detective Carmen O'Inns is investigating the murder of a child. At her daughter's school, Luisa encounters two of her former classmates. The three of them are bound together by a horrible secret involving the accidental death of a classmate. Soon, one of Elba's classmates accidentally dies. Separated by forty years, how are the children's deaths connected?

History keeps repeating itself and life and art are imitating each other in Carmen Posada's bizarre mystery "Child's Play" - an intricately plotted novel that asks us, "How well do we really know our children?" "Child's Play" is a fast-paced, fun to read novel that is very macabre. Posada herself has been compared to the great Agatha Christie of whom I was once a devoted fan. The similarities are incredible. Some of Dame Agatha's plots involved the murdering of children and murders committed by children. Numerous murders were perpetrated by those who seemed perfectly innocent. One of Dame Agatha's characters summed it up quite well when she said, "When no one suspects you, murder is easy." As pointed out by a friend of Luisa, there are many murders each year that are disguised as accidents.

In the foyer of Luisa Dávila's apartment, there are mirrors facing each other that create an endless series of reflections. The mirror is a symbol used constantly throughout "Child's Play." For example, the past and present mirror each other, children are mirror images of their parents and fictional characters in novels are mirror images of their authors. Sometimes it is best not to look into a mirror; the reflection can be shocking. The more Luisa searches for the truth behind the children's deaths, the more shocked and horrified she becomes. The reader feels great sympathy towards her as a single parent raising a difficult child at fifty two while writing a novel that is releasing suppressed feelings that threaten to drive her insane.

"Child's Play" has been adeptly translated from Spanish to English by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson. The novel was easy to read and I would never have known it was a translation if it hadn't been stated as such on the title page. "Child's Play" is highly recommended if you enjoy bizarre mysteries with strong elements of psychological horror. The ending is rather strange and unnerving, as were some mysteries penned by Agatha Christie. After reading "Child's Play," you will want to pay more attention to the games your children are playing. Some of them might be quite deadly.


Joseph B. Hoyos

spooky-what if you thought your young child was a murderer?

This is a clever but sparkling read which deconstructs crime fiction while providing satisfying mysteries. The humour is at times ebony black and the pages are laced with astute psychological observation, as you would expect from a Jamesian devotee; the psychological eye trained not only on the characters, but also on author and reader.

(3.5 stars) The first several pages of this Spanish gothic melodrama are characterized by overblown prose, trite imagery, clichés, self-conscious attempts to play on the reader's heartstrings, and an undeniable straining for "effect." Then in a twist, the reader discovers that this excerpt is merely the beginning of a manuscript about a child murder written by Luisa Davila, the main character (an author) in the larger novel. Luisa, aged fifty-two and gifted with a "rampant imagination," has just moved into a new Madrid apartment with her eleven-year-old daughter Elba, who will attend the same private English High School which Luisa attended as a child.

What follows is an unusual variation of metafiction, in which Luisa creates an over-the-top novel about the death of a child at a private school, while simultaneously describing the similar death of a child forty years ago when she herself was a child, and then relating the details of yet another death of a child during the time that her daughter Elba is a student. Three young boys. Three deaths. Three mysteries.

When Luisa takes Elba to school on the first day, she finds, coincidentally, that her best friend from school, Sofia Marquez, is going to be Elba's teacher, and even more coincidentally, that Sofia's daughter Avril, is not only in the same class but is about to become Elba's best friend. She also discovers that Miguel, the third living member of the group of old friends, has a son Miguel ("Miki") who is also in the same class at school. The adult Miguel's identical twin Antonio died in an accident at the school when he was eleven, and Miguel's son Miki soon continues the family tradition. Luisa's imagination works overtime as she tries to remember all the details about Antonio's death and then tries to find out more information about the accident involving Miki.

Everyone involved in Luisa's life, including Sofia, Miguel, Elba's best friend Avril, and even Elba herself, come under Luisa's scrutiny as she tries to decide if someone she has loved could possibly be a murderer. The several investigations on three different levels--the imagined story, the death from forty years ago, and the recent death at the school--all lead to Luisa's lengthy analysis of people, how they respond to frustration, and the extremes to which they might be driven if provoked. Luisa can never sure whether she is hearing the truth, whether she is imagining complications where they do not exist, and whether she is suspecting innocent people, including her own daughter, of heinous acts. The author frequently provides three sentences of analysis where one would do, and she raises questions which cast doubt on what might be innocent actions on the part of other characters. By the time the novel ends and the deaths have been analyzed ad infinitum on the levels of all three subplots, the reader has come to believe fully in the philosophy of Julio Iglesias, which echoes throughout the novel: "Sometimes yes, sometimes no, sometimes you, sometimes me..." Mary Whipple

In a private school in Madrid four decades ago, Antonio Gasset drowns in the swimming pool. His twin brother Miguel never quite got over the final separation between them when they were just young students.

Now forty years later, Miguel meets his school-days' friends, Sofia Marquez and Luisa Davila. Sofia teaches at the school they attended while her class includes her daughter Avril, Luisa's daughter Elba and Miguel's son Miki; all tweeners. Miguel is in a nasty custody battle with his fourth wife and Luisa has changed from children's writer to cerebral mysteries. When Miki dies falling down stairs at the school, the novelist begins seeing murderers lurking at every corners of the school; no different than how she felt when Antonio allegedly accidentally died.

With all that is going on, CHILD'S PLAY lacks suspense as the intriguing story line has more of a philosophical loquacity to it than an action thriller. The key cast members are fully developed, but are introspective even when they debate what happened then and what is occurring now. Well written with a harrowing profoundness that is not for everyone especially those readers who prefer action, Carmen Posades provides an interesting relationship drama in which the ties that bind the living are death.

Harriet Klausner

I very much liked the mix of roman noir, the reflection on the ever-present nature of our past and the element of children's innocence that's not always as we imagine it to be. This is the second book I've read by this author. She has a very good grasp of the various levels of a plot and she plays artfully with human folly/appearances.