Title: TAKE ME APART
Author: Sara Sligar
Read: November 2023
Expected publication: out now
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Book Description:
A young archivist's obsession with
her subject's mysterious death threatens to destroy her fragile grasp on
sanity, in a riveting debut novel of psychological suspense.
My musings:
I love it when I come across a new author whose
book totally blew me away and TAKE ME APART fell into that category. Both an
intriguing and captivating as well as a contemplative and somewhat sad mystery,
once I started, I couldn’t tear myself away!
Why is it that mysteries revolving
around family secrets are so irresistible? I guess almost everyone has found an
intriguing nameless photo in an old family album at some stage and wondered
about the story behind it. Mirand Brand doesn’t only feature in photographs,
she is also the artist behind them, with herself as the subject delivering her
subtle messages through her art. Like many artists, Miranda is as brilliant as
she is troubled, suffering a tragic untimely death when her only son Theo is
only eleven years old. A grown man now, Theo has inherited the family home with
all its clutter and its secrets. He hires Kate, a former journalist and now
archivist to sort through the vast collection of papers and photos and separate
the wheat from the chaff. Due to Miranda’s fame, even some of her old photos
and notes could bring in a small fortune if sold to collectors. As Kate makes
her way through mountains of paperwork, she becomes intrigued – and then
obsessed – with Miranda’s tragic life and vows to find out when really led to
her death ….
Sligar uses a variety of styles to
unravel her mystery. Whilst the main perspective is Kate’s voice, we also get
to read snippets out of Miranda’s diary, old correspondences, newspaper
articles, receipts and other pieces of her life left behind. It was this aspect
of the story I found most fascinating, and as I tried to piece together the
details of Miranda’s life I myself became a little bit obsessed with learning
more about her. Because Theo is less than forthcoming, the mystery took on a
sense of urgency and ominous foreboding that would otherwise have been absent,
a very clever way to keep the reader engaged.
There are many tragic themes that
urge reflection, from domestic violence to mental health, the hidden scars we
hide from the world, the driving forces behind art and the fine line between
brilliance and madness. Miranda was such a fascinating, complex character! I
particularly enjoyed the descriptions of Miranda’s art, which isn’t easy to
convey with words but which the author pulled off beautifully here. Kate also
made a perfect protagonist with just enough secrets of her own to make her
story compelling and her character well rounded and enigmatic.
I think that labelling TAKE ME APART
a thriller may be doing it a bit of a disservice because the story was more
slow burning intrigue than action, character rather than plot driven. Yes,
there are the questions surrounding Miranda’s death, but it is by far not the
driving force here. Rather, we want to get to know Miranda Brand, the real
person behind her public profile, which is slowly revealed through debris left
from her everyday life. I could have spent many more chapters reading excerpts
from her diary or getting glimpses of her art. Readers who are looking for a
twisty thriller with murder and mayhem may find themselves disappointed, but
anyone who enjoys a beautifully written character study of a troubled mind
should grab this book ASAP. I picked it up without any expectations and without
even reading the blurb, and was blown away by the story. It’s definitely going
on my favourites list this year and I hope we will see a lot more stories from
Sara Sligar in future.
