Die a Little -- Megan Abbott

I really think that you have to be in the right mood for a book, that sometimes no matter what the author does, a story or a style isn’t going to resonate with this particular reader at this particular moment. Which brings me to Megan Abbott’s debut novel, DIE A LITTLE. Having heard a lot of good things about this book, I gave it a try months ago, read about twenty pages, didn’t care for it, and put it back on the shelf. But something kept telling me that this is the sort of book I usually like, so I gave it another try, and I’m glad I did. This time I raced right through it and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Set in Los Angeles in the mid-Fifties, it’s the story of schoolteacher Lora King and her brother Bill, who’s a detective for the district attorney’s office. Lora and Bill are very close -- too close for siblings, some reviewers said, but I’m not sure I agree with that. I think Abbott is just capturing a different era, a time when adult siblings could live together with no hint of sexual suspicion and, indeed, nothing improper going on. But either way, the ties between Lora and Bill are strong enough so that when Bill falls in love with and marries a woman named Alice Steele, you know that change in the status quo is going cause some serious repercussions. And by the end of the book, boy, does it, as Lora starts investigating Alice’s background and discovers a lot of dark and dangerous secrets that lead to people doing things they thought they never could, resulting in a fusion of domestic drama and noir crime novel that works really well.

Lora narrates this book in the present tense, a style I usually don’t care for, but between this book and Sara Gruen’s WATER FOR ELEPHANTS I’m starting to like it a little better. I still think the story is awfully slow to develop and the first half of the book is too laden with period details, but once Abbott has everything established the second half goes by at a much faster pace, galloping along to an ending that’s not really surprising but still quite effective.

After starting this book and not liking it, I also picked up Abbott’s second novel, THE SONG IS YOU (couldn’t resist the cover), but didn’t get very far in it, either. After reading DIE A LITTLE, though, I’ll definitely be giving THE SONG IS YOU a second chance, too.