Doris Betts (1932–2012)

SPOILER WARNING.

A runaway bride, a boy escaped from sex slavery, and a seminary student deafened by an explosion come together in the mountains around Reno. The book is suspenseful. though it is, in the Shakespearean sense, a comedy: it ends with a wedding (or the promise of one). At about a third of the way through, after the boy is kidnapped, I thought it was going in a different direction, in which all the characters (except for the protagonist) were evil, but happily, I was wrong (and the hint about not trusting trustworthy faces was, I guess, a red herring.) As a classic comedy, the book should be allowed its one-dimensional characters. The two men that Luna must escape, her father and her fiance, have no redeeming virtues. The author gives a nod to this problem when, at one point, she writes that a film would have shown the soft heart hidden behind the father's gruff exterior, but this wasn't that film. And one has to grant Betts that not all people do have that warm gooey center... but books are generally richer when we can, at least, pity, those whom we dislike. In any case, the book kept me engrossed and left me satisfied.… (altro)