Customer Reviews

High Strung: A Novel

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

No loose-ends are left undone in this novel about a thirty-something returning home to find closure regarding her past. Dalton masterfully weaves the Vietnam era to the present while presenting parents many of us know very well: flawed, ill-fated, but loving, nonetheless, in their own quirky ways. With characters not unlike those from a McMurtry novel, the reader will find him or herself laughing and crying with their struggles, compelled to turn each pleasurable page, to follow them to the book's end.

This is one of those few and far between books that both my husband and I enjoyed. The interesting characters and unfolding plot kept our attention until the end. I can't wait until Quinn has her next book published!

This book is terrific. The characters are quirky, but they ring true. The double mother and daughter plots are intriguiing as the two characters work through intersecting demons to figure out their lives. It's a great read for the chick-lit crowd and for those who lived through the peace, love and protest bombs. This was a fun read and a very thought-provoking novel. I'll be looking for more from Quinn Dalton.

I had the pleasure of reading an early copy of this book for blurb purposes, a blurb I happily handed over. It's a stunner of a debut! Keep an eye out for Dalton's short story collection -- Bulletproof Girl. The stories are complex and startling and stunning, ripe for discussions about womanhood in contemporary American society.

Quinn Dalton combines humor and poignance as we follow the main character, Merle Winslow, as she returns to her roots in small-town Ohio to face the family she left and the past she's tried to ignore. Merle's dry humor and emotional honesty make the reader want to get to know her better and see her through a tumultuous time in her life, in which she attempts to figure out where she's been and where she's going. Dalton does a wonderful job of juxtaposing Merle's present and her family's dysfunctional past, keeping two engaging storylines flowing evenly and overlapping appropriately. Dalton also "lightens up" a theme that could become heavy by peppering the novel with funny, quirky scenes, usually involving Merle's brother Olin. At times, though, I wished for another 100 pages so that the relationships and storylines involving ancillary characters could be developed more thoroughly. All in all, this is a wonderful debut novel and I look forward to another.

I highly recommend this novel especially for the 30 somethings who are wrestling with identity crises as well as developing a sense of the importance of family and roots to all of us. Ms. Dalton has written a charming, lighthearted and on occasion a bittersweet novel to make all of us take stock of where we are in our lives and what is important to us. Take time to savor her writing.

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.

I liked this book and would recommend it without hesitation. The strength is the narrator, Merle. At her best, Merle's voice is authentic; she's smart, witty, passionate almost without realizing it. Merle's observations and her plight struck a definite chord with me as one of those, like her, who grew up in the seventies and eighties, went off to conquer the world (or at least edit porn books in London -- Merle, not me) in the nineties, and is now back nosing around the past, taking stock of how life and our loves have unfolded so far. The author, Quinn Dalton, offers up very sharp insights and a ruthless humor, the kind that comically but firmly doesn't allow people to wriggle free from accountability for their own actions. Great work in a first novel!

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.

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