The Weight of Blood

The Weight of Blood by Laura McHugh  336 pages

I usually don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but in 2018 I picked one that I thought I could actually complete.  I decided that I would pick one book that has been languishing on my library shelves. For the March selection, I picked Laura McHugh’s The Weight of Blood. Others I’ve known have told me how much they enjoyed this novel, and I was ready to pull an all-nighter, it was supposed to be that good.

McHugh uses one of my favorite writing mechanics, dualing timelines. In her debut novel, McHugh’s plot line was two disappearances a generation apart.

In current time, sixteen-year-old Lucy Dane has recently arrived from Iowa.  Although her family has deep, deep roots in this Ozark Mountain town of Henbane, she feels like an outsider.

When one of her friends, Cheri, is found murdered, hacked up and put in an abandoned tree log, Lucy vows that she will find her killer. Lucy now has two reasons to go snooping around town. First to learn who killed Cheri and whatever became of the mother who abandoned her.

The other timeline is Lucy’s mother Lila. Many in the town believed she was a witch and never knew what happened to her.

The timelines were confusing at first, as I didn’t get that Lila was Lucy’s mother. Heck I didn’t even realize that it was a competing timeline at first. Ninety percent of all the other characters were in both set of timelines, and since both sections were told in first person, I was a little lost through the first two-thirds of the novel. 

In the second half of the novel, readers get to hear other characters’ point of view. They were told in third person, which I found much easier to figure out exactly where they were in Lucy and Lila’s story.

Although this wasn’t the couldn’t-put-it down read I had anticipated, I enjoyed the story and trying to figure it out.  For me, there were still unanswered questions, which is the reason that

The Weight of Blood receives 4 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.