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The Witch Elm

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There is plenty to like about this book: very descriptive writing, well-developed characters, intricate plot. It was compelling enough for me to keep reading to the end, and I enjoyed the experience. However, having read all of the Dublin Murder Squad books, I feel this stand-alone falls short of the author's regular storytelling ability.

Character development is an important appeal factor for me, but they need to be characters that I like, or at least that I can understand. While Ms. French does a good job of developing her characters, I just couldn't like Toby. I've read a couple of interviews with the author regarding this book in the hopes that they would shed some light and help me to better understand the story. And, from what I read, it sounds like Toby was written the way he was on purpose. Some readers will feel sympathy for him and his situation; I couldn't.

I did like a few of the characters (Melissa, Uncle Hugo), but the three cousins (Toby, Susana, Leon) were annoying. After thinking about it a bit, I guess it boils down to the fact that Melissa and Uncle Hugo were the type of people to believe in others and see the best in them, while the three cousins seemed to be more self-absorbed, calculating, and inclined to assume the worst. Perhaps because the story is told from Toby's perspective, and his cousins are the people he knows most intimately in life, we get a deeper look at them as people - flaws and all - making it harder to like them as much as those individuals in whom Toby mostly sees only the good.

So, after a bit of reflection, I can understand the underlying factors at play. But it doesn't change my overall experience, which to me deserved 3 stars.

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The Witch Elm by Tana French is a stand-alone novel that is not part of her Dublin Murder Squad series. This book features Toby as the main character and it made me realize just how few books I'm reading where that is the case. Toby is brutally attacked one night in his apartment and spends quite a long time recovering in the hospital before he moves in to help care for his newly diagnosed with cancer uncle. Not long after Toby moves in with his uncle a decomposing body is discovered in a tree in the backyard. The mystery of who and how the body came to be there is the crux of the story. A twisty thriller sure to keep you up late reading! Read and enjoy!

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"The Witch Elm" by Tana French, Viking, 464 pages, Oct. 9, 2018.

Toby Hennessy does PR for a small art gallery in Ireland. He has lived an overprivileged, charmed life.

When he manages to avert a near-disaster at work that could have gotten him fired, he goes out to celebrate with his two best friends. They drink too much. Toby makes it home safely, but wakes at night to find two men burglarizing his apartment.

Toby makes the mistake of fighting them and is severely beaten. He suffers brain damage. After his release from the hospital, Toby learns that his uncle Hugo has terminal brain cancer.

Hugo, a genealogist, was always very good to Toby and his cousins, Leon and Susanna. The cousins are as close as siblings. Toby and his girlfriend, Melissa, move in with Hugo to help him.

During a Sunday dinner with the extended family, Susanna's children find a skull in an old witch elm in Hugo's yard. The adults are convinced that it is from someone who died many years ago. As the police try to unravel the mystery, Toby begins to question his life.

Toby is an unsympathetic character and has a lot of internal monologues, making the story move slowly. Despite those drawbacks, this is an excellent novel with some major twists and an amazing ending. What happened, why and the resulting actions are fascinating.

Tana French's plotting and characters are outstanding. She wrote six books about the Dublin Murder Squad, which is one of my favorite police series. "The Witch Elm" isn't one of the series. This is the only one told from the view of a crime victim, not the police.

In accordance with FTC guidelines, the Advanced Readers Copy of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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Tana French is just so legit. I feel weird giving this 3 stars when it’s written way better than some other 3 star books I’ve rated, but for this one the plot itself was what held me back from loving it. This plot in the hands of another, less polished writer could have gone horribly wrong. There’s a lot going on here, with a burglary and a murder and memory loss and brain cancer and all kinds of things - it all comes together in the end, but for a majority of the book it felt like two totally separate storylines that deserved their own books. Most of the characters were really nuanced and intriguing (Hugo was a mystery I wanted to unfold, and you just knew there was more to Susanna than her stay-at-home mom facade), but I had a hard time with the narrator (Toby) especially towards the end. It was hard at times to empathize with him despite his unfortunate circumstances, but I think that was the intention all along so I’m not sure that’s a negative. Despite my issues with it, it was still a compelling page turner. Once again, French left me feeling thoroughly unnerved well after I had read the last page - if that’s not a sign of a solid psychological mystery, I don’t know what is.

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"The Witch Elm" is a mystery about how this skeleton got into this tree, as well as how our main character Toby is connected to it. But ultimately it is more a story about family, memory, and how our perceptions of reality can change. Toby is an unreliable narrator not in that he is deliberately hiding facts from the reader, but in that he has gaps in his memory because of time and because of a traumatic brain injury sustained at the start of the book. French did a very good job of integrating the burglary and attack into the plot without making it feel purely plot driven, as there was a slow build up to it and then a sustained period of immediate consequences after that lingered well before the main drive of the plot at Toby's Uncle Hugo's home. And since Toby is constantly questioning his own memory, and his potential culpability in regards to the body in the tree, the reader also has to wonder whether or not we are following an innocent bystander caught up in a murder, or the murderer himself. But French is also very adept at presenting other characters who could also have a hand in murder, for many realistic and believable reasons. I quite enjoyed the mystery and seeing where it was going to go next.

I also very much enjoyed the family dynamic that Toby had with those around him, from his Uncle Hugo to his cousins Susanna and Leon. While the relationship with Susanna and Leon was a bit strained, be it because of their potential to be suspects to their differing views on how they should be dealing with their uncle to baggage from the past, it felt very real for a family with various dysfunctions. And Toby's relationship with Hugo is quite lovely, as Hugo is dying of a brain tumor and Toby, having his own medical set backs and problems with cognition, really connects with him. They all did feel like a real family with it's ups and downs, and this aspect of the book was probably the strongest for me.

I think that the main quibbles I had were with the length of the story. It takes a little bit of time to get started, for one thing, and while I understand why it does (as mentioned above, French is careful to make the attack and break in feel like more than just a device to get Toby's mind foggy), I felt like it dragged its feet a bit. I found myself tempted to skip ahead to the family estate, and while I didn't do that I do think that it took just a little too long to get all of the set up into place. And then it went on a bit longer than it had to, with a tacked on moment at the end that didn't feel lit it needed to be there. I don't wish to spoil it so I won't say what it is here, but a new moment of conflict with very dire consequences happens well after we've found out the solution to the Wych Elm mystery at hand. And I didn't quite understand why it had to happen at all. It felt unnecessary and it didn't add much to the plot. 

But all that said, Tana French is still an author who knows how to write an atmospheric mystery with some fascinating characters. "The Witch Elm" was a fun detour from her "Dublin Murder Squad" series, and I will be very curious to see if she is going to write more stand alone novels down the line, because this one stood on it's own two feet pretty handily. 

This Review will be posted at www.thelibraryladies.com on 10/9/2018

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A wonderful, standalone novel from Ms. French, an extraordinarily talented writer. What I enjoyed, was how we are dropped into Toby's life at a life-changing moment, though both he and the reader don't know what's about to happen. Toby raises the questions, "What if I had just gone to Melissa's apartment that night?" This novel has three different phases, and we go through the phases along with Toby. I've read other reviews that call Toby a jerk (and worse) because he was unaware and unsympathetic to other people's pain and struggles. I struggle with that simplistic judgment. Each individual has their own point of view and way in which they view the world, and that is informed by their surroundings and experiences. No two people will ever look at the same situation and have identical thoughts and feelings about it. If they did, I would be worried. I like how Ms. French approached Toby's character and how deep in his head we were able to get after his accident, that I found myself just as angry on his behalf at how his life had changed. I felt his confusion as we realized he had been viewed by others in a way that was completely incompatible with how he viewed himself and his life. As with all of Ms. French's novels, this book does not shy away from the gritty and uncomfortable aspects of life and the delicate relationships between people. This book was part mystery and part philosophical contemplation on who we are fundamentally at our core when everything superficial is stripped away. I really enjoyed this story and as always, I looked forward to Ms. French's future novels.

I received a copy of this title from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

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This is a 5 star read based just on the quality of writing alone. The author’s words follow a man’s mental state from normal stability through partial loss of memory to his questioning who he really is. It is a study of relationships between family and friends and questions how much can one person really know another. And it reflects on how one small inconsequential event can affect so many lives for years into the future. A wonderful, engrossing novel!

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC to review.

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Here it is- I think Tana French fans are going to really be split on this book. I'm personally really split on this book. I loved the last quarter of it, and read that last quarter probably faster than I did the rest of the book combined, but that might actually be because the first 3/4 of the book moved fairly slowly. And I've been fangirling Tana French's books for a lot of years now, so I'm used and appreciate her clever pacing. But I found myself really frustrated with the first quarter of the book, because when events are mentioned in the book description and then it takes nearly a third of the book before they actually happen, I find myself waiting impatiently for said event to happen and for the story to move on from what's already been described before I even started the book.

Aside from that complaint, I did genuinely enjoy this book. It has what I appreciate most about Tana French's writing, which is a great combination of character development and character introspection, as well as a solid story. Once I settled into the story, there wasn't a chance I was going to stop reading until the end. It's really got a lot of the same elements as the author's previous books- it just takes a little time to adjust.

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This author is a favorite at the library and many are waiting for her latest novel to be in print. Toby is a happy-go-lucky charmer who doesn't worry about things because most of what you worry about never comes to pass. But one night after celebrating a mistake at work that didn't turn out to harm him, he is beaten by burglars. Recovery is long and hard and he has to cope with the fact that his live has changed forever. While at the family home, a skull is found and as detectives get involved Toby must face the reality that his past might not be the same as he remembers it. So what is his life to be? Neither his past or his future are as he envisioned.

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Thank you, Netgalley, for this arc.

I've only read three of Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series, and this book seemed to have a bit of that same flavor. The book seemed to start off slow, but then after the main character, Toby, was attacked things definitely started to pick up. I really liked Toby's uncle, Hugo, and Toby's love interest, Melissa - I even liked Toby's cousins, Leon and Susanna. However, this book seemed to be unnecessarily long - the chapters seemed to go on FOREVER. The story took on a few twists that I hadn't been looking out for, and I don't know how I was envisioning it ending, but it sure wasn't that way. I will probably continue to read Tana French's work. This new standalone wasn't stellar, but it did keep me engaged.

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Tana French is in no hurry to tell her story, and that it perfectly alright with me since her storytelling technique is utterly delicious! This amazing story has the feel of a dark southern gothic tale even though it takes place in Ireland. The atmosphere is so perfect and so thick that the few times I looked up from this book, it was hard to reconcile my actual whereabouts with what I expected to see. I often read a mystery/thriller and find the "surprise twist" at the end predictable and stale, but this book made me gasp in shock on multiple occasions with twists and turns I never saw coming. This is truly Tana French at her mind-boggling best. I loved every second.

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Tana French is a gifted mystery writer who always writes a creative and interesting novel with good characterization. She doesn't disappoint with The Witch Elm. The tugs and pulls that the main character experiences propels the reader along a journey that includes art deception, assault, a hidden body, and extended family.

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An intriguing story with lots to keep the reader interested. However, unfortunately this pales in comparison to French's Dublin Murder Squad books. It suffers from an unpleasant protagonist and the lack of a detailed investigative perspective. Beautifully written but sadly not the author's best.

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3.5 In this rather lengthy stand alone, French again explores the sense of identity, as well as the question, How well do we really know another person? Three cousins, children of four brothers, who have all spent their summers, vacations from school at the house where their unmarried Uncle Hugh lives. Grown up now, not as close as they once were, they all come together after Toby is attacked in his apartment and left for dead. Although he makes it, he has lingering effects from the attack, one being his memory which has huge holes, blank spaces.

So who is he now? He no longer feels like himself, far from the capable man he had thought he was. When a body is found in the old witch tree in his Uncle Hugh's garden, the Garda is notified. When it turns out t be someone they know, all come in suspicion, especially it seems Toby. The one Garda, reminded me so much of Peter Falk, playing Colombo. Dating myself I know. So the story goes,the very slow unraveling of a history of the characters. Intriguing story, well written as all of her novels are, the pace is very slow, and the pages long. One needs patience here, need to be in the mood for a slow burner. There are plenty of surprises, the characters interesting, myself I had a soft spot for Uncle Hugh, and the questions posed within, important ones.

More a character study than a thriller I believe, though there are a few action scenes. I enjoyed this, but not as much as some of her previous works. Have a soft spot for her Dublin murder squad.

ARC from Netgalley.

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This book was a little different from Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series. But I still loved it. I love how French takes time to build characters and puts little hints and foreshadowing in. And there are some parts that might be considered show but I felt was just building up the story. I really enjoyed this.

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Toby doesn't die when he's beaten brutally by a pair of thieves, but his charmed life does end. His cracked ribs heal, but his TBI wrecks havoc on his memory, speech, and personality. Ironically, Toby finds himself acting as caretaker to his uncle Hugo as he succumbs to brain cancer. Bolstered by his godsend of a girlfriend, Toby returns to Ivy House, where he spent so many idyllic summers with his cousins. Just as he's starting to heal, his nephew finds a skull in the backyard and everything implodes. Toby is an utterly terrible human and the plot moves glacially, but the slow revelation of everyone's dark sides is riveting.

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I’m not sure how I feel about this book and that’s okay. One of the reasons why I read Tana French is her ability to delve into the human psyche and come out with truths that are realistically terrifying. This book was a fantastic example of this. The Witch Elm is not a crime story (though there are plenty crimes going on), but a trippy story that makes you question the nature of memory, family, and morality. Me and my logical brain really struggled through the first half of this book. I only started enjoying it when I let go of my need to make sense of the narrative and instead immersed myself in the blurry world of a very unreliable narrator.

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About a third of the way through The Witch Elm, by Tana French, I started to wonder when the book would get good. I was interested, but not totally hooked. Now that I’ve finished the book, I will never doubt French again. The first third of the novel sets the stage for the beautifully written parallels and ethical dilemmas of the second two-thirds of the book by presenting a thorough psychological portrait of protagonist Toby Hennessy. In the opening chapters of The Witch Elm, Toby receives an awful lesson in how privileged his life as a charming, middle class, white heterosexual man has been. Over and over, privilege and its benefits are thrown into sharp relief as Toby’s life is turned upside down and inside out.

There are two worst nights of Toby’s life. Both of them start out the same way, with Toby having a good time with friends and drinks. Both of them end with a crime that changes his life. The crime that occurs at the beginning of The Witch Elm sees Toby badly beaten in his Dublin apartment by a pair of thieves. He suffers from slurred speech and can’t always find the right words. He can’t multitask any more. He’s got weakness on his left side. Perhaps worst of all, his self-confidence (the epitome of his sense of self) is completely destroyed. When Toby relocates to the suburbs to help care for his terminally ill uncle and to recuperate himself, his nephew finds evidence of the other crime: a human skull in the 200-year-old wych elm in the garden of the Hennessey family’s Ivy House.

The skull turns out to be part of the remains of a teenaged boy who everyone thought had committed suicide ten years ago. The investigation into the boy, Dominic’s, murder, however, kicks up a bunch of sinister gaps in Toby’s memory. Toby remembers Dominic as kind of a mate and basically a “good guy.” Toby can’t remember much about why someone would want to kill Dominic, but his cousins remember Dominic as a sadistic, relentless bully. The more Toby learns, the more he starts to wonder if his habit of forgetting his own bad behavior might be concealing something horrible. His inability to remember what may have happened ten years ago torments him, so much so that he starts to wonder if he is the killer. And yet, things don’t quite add up—at least until the end of the book when everything wraps up in a masterful and deeply satisfying conclusion.

The mystery at the heart of The Witch Elms is delightfully plotted out. I loved the way it all played out because of the ethical complications. But the best part of The Witch Elm, I think, is the way that it exposes how we as a society bestow the privilege of being believed on certain people and withhold it from others. For some reason, white, middle class, teenaged boys (especially upper class white boys) who have a decent reputation are believed, while teenaged girls of whatever ethnicity or reputation are not believed. If girls (or women or LGBT+ people or people of color) accuse the privileged, they are told that “boys will be boys” or that they’re making things up. Toby is shown this over and over, slowly realizing how damaging it is to a person’s self-worth to be disbelieved on top of being bullied. There were a few points when I wanted to reach into the book and shake Toby until his teeth rattled because he just does not get it, not until he finally sees the full picture. The passages when he finally does it get it are simultaneously satisfying and disheartening because they contain so much truth.

There is plenty of fodder for discussion for book groups in The Witch Elm. In addition to fueling conversation about privilege and how it protects predators, readers will be left with questions about how malleable our memory is, whether or not its justifiable to take justice into one’s hands when official channels are not available, and how much people will sacrifice for their loved ones. The thematic parallels that repeatedly echo questions about privilege, memory, and the rest never bog down the plot (which gets very tense more than a few times), and give this book a lot of substance in addition to its cracking mystery.

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The author is always in control of her characters, her plot and her novel, as each revelation teases and provokes more questions for the reader and the protagonist, Toby, who is trying to find out as much about himself as about the past. The family dynamics that are so key to the novel and to the mystery are complex and carefully thought out, with the normality of banal interactions and reactions counter-balancing the horror of the world in which Toby is living. Prepare to settle in for a stretch, while this book takes you on a determined quest for the truth.

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. I was so excited to receive an ARC for Tana French's new book because I really enjoy her Dublin Murder Squad Series. Unfortunately, this was not as exciting as her other books and I just could not get into this story. I did not care about any of the characters (with the exception of Hugo), and it was very slow paced. I felt like I was forcing myself to finish it. I will say that it started picking up around the final quarter of the book, which is why I ended up giving it three stars.

This mystery might work better for someone who is a fast reader, but since it takes me awhile to finish a book, it seemed to drag on more.

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