See How Small
Scott Blackwood, 2015
Little, Brown and Company
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316373807
Summary
A riveting novel about the aftermath of a brutal murder of three teenage girls.
One late autumn evening in a Texas town, two strangers walk into an ice cream shop shortly before closing time. They bind up the three teenage girls who are working the counter, set fire to the shop, and disappear.
See How Small tells the stories of the survivors—family, witnesses, and suspects—who must endure in the wake of atrocity. Justice remains elusive in their world, human connection tenuous.
Hovering above the aftermath of their deaths are the three girls. They watch over the town and make occasional visitations, trying to connect with and prod to life those they left behind. "See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart," they say.
A master of compression and lyrical precision, Scott Blackwood has surpassed himself with this haunting, beautiful, and enormously powerful new novel. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1965
• Where—El Dorado, Arkansas, USA
• Raised—Tennessee, Oklahoma, Texas
• Education—University of Texas; Texas State University
• Awards—Whiting Writers’ Award
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois
Scott Blackwood is the author of the 2015 novel See How Small and the 2009 novel We Agreed to Meet Just Here, which won a 2011 Whiting Writers’ Award, the AWP Prize for the Novel, The Texas Institute of Letters Award for best work of fiction, and was a finalist for the Pen Center USA Award in fiction.
His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Gettysburg Review, Boston Review, Southwest Review, Chicago Tribune Printer’s Row Journal, and New York Times. It has been anthologized in Janet Burroway’s Imaginative Writing.
His two narrative nonfiction books, The Rise and Fall of Paramont Records, Volumes I & II—produced by Jack White—tell the curious tale of a white-owned "Race record" label that began in a Wisconsin chair factory and changed American popular music forever. Scott has been individually nominated for a 2015 Grammy Award for Volume I and featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Sound Opinions, and in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone and elsewhere. A former Dobie Paisano Fellow and long-time resident of Austin, Texas, Scott now lives in Chicago and teaches fiction writing in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Southern Illinois University. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Blackwood's portraits of all these characters are surprising and compassionate. Not a single sentence in See How Small is maudlin or overwrought.... It's not an easy book to read....descriptions of the emotional torture their families go through, however, are beyond heartbreaking.... It's a kind of paradox that Blackwood explores with compassionate eyes, beautifully poetic writing and artistic fearlessness. See How Small is a brutal, necessary and near perfect novel.
Michael Schaub - NPR
Mr. Blackwood has a way of writing where you feel like you’re constantly trying to catch up, be privy to what’s really making this story tick. While this style can be an asset, especially when leading a reader through a maze of intrigue, it can also be frustrating.... But the novel is not without its thoughtful statements brimming with stories wanting to be told.... See How Small is not for the faint of heart and has very little happiness or hope.... [It] raises questions about whether the real victims of a tragedy aren’t those that die but those forced to live.
Megan McLachlan - Pittsburgh Post Gazette
(Starred review.) [A] genre-defying novel of powerful emotion, intrigue, and truth. From the opening pages, which artfully skirt from past to present.... [B]ased on a similar, still-unsolved 1991 case in Austin, Tex., Blackwood explores the effects of senseless crime on an innocent, tightly knit community, using deft prose to mine the essence of human grief and compassion.
Publishers Weekly
The novel has much to say about the mysteries of the human psyche, the far-reaching effects of violence, and the disparate ways grief works on people.
Booklist
Similar on the surface to Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, this lyrical, abstract, and less sentimental novel by Blackwood about murdered teenage girls observing the living will probably not appeal to as wide an audience but may haunt literary fiction readers long after the unsettling ending. —Laurie Cavanaugh, Holmes P.L., Halifax, MA
Library Journal
The novel is strikingly creepy, if a bit affected—the brevity of the chapters and gauzy prose have a lyrical effect but also make the story feel diffuse, with no one peculiar, uncanny moment given the chance to build up a head of steam. Blackwood is an excellent stylist, though in the name of unconventionality, the reader lacks a few narrative toeholds.
Kirkus Reviews
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