This story is not a mystery as we all expect, but a mystery of how people react to one another. Silver’s approach to these characters is dynamic not in the relationship between the families as much as the relationships within the families ... While the story is thin of plot, the underlying theme of the story—how tragedy affects each of us—rises to the top to be considered in its entirety ... Silver’s writing is strong—probably her strongest skill. Her vocabulary is varied and robust; she chooses words carefully, designed to color the settings, the characters, and, yes, the plot ... character driven, and the reader will get wrapped up in each character’s purpose and the story’s theme. A definite keeper.

The existential crises of the times—war, Watergate, the civil rights movement—take a back seat in Silver’s newest novel, behind the more immediate challenges of parenting and providing, caring for others versus caring for oneself ... Silver’s luminous exploration of foundational relationships catastrophically altered by a gut-wrenching accident reveals the poignancy and vulnerability that underlie so many human contracts. Whether writing in the precociously gleeful voices of two guileless children or the increasingly jaded tones of damaged adults, Silver achieves a powerful and gripping authenticity that captures the confusion and, yes, the mystery of both innocence and maturity.

... a perceptive novel about female friendship ... The danger of fictionalizing a child’s voice is that it can come off as contrivance. But the language Silver uses for Miggy and Ellen resists that trap; each girl’s chapters are written with a keen ear for the voices of children, filtered through the syntactic elegance that marks the entire book. In this way, language becomes character; Miggy and Ellen, as well as their parents, are embodied as much by what they think as by what happens to them ... The Mysteries reveals that adulthood comes at the cost of a belief in dreams, satisfaction, or even an imagined future.

I can’t help but wish that I’d spent a few of my pandemic hours doing something other than reading The Mysteries by Marisa Silver. In theory, this novel—that centers on the intoxicating, dangerous relationship that two little girls can tumble into—should be a rich text, with descriptions of female attachment that ring true to anyone who once found themselves head over heels in a childhood friendship. Unfortunately, it is distracted, jumping around too much to provide even cursory information about peripheral characters, making everyone mostly flat and one-dimensional. And the apex of the book doesn’t do anything to challenge these caricatures ... Silver clearly has the tools to create multidimensional characters: this relationship starts off strong, and there is the space for more nuance; it just doesn’t lead anywhere ... This novel sets out to be about so much: friendship, marriage, grief, politics, and that adults don’t actually know anything even though they pretend to. In attempting that ambitious task, it fails to provide meaningful insights on any of those fronts ... The novel is set in the Nixon era, though you wouldn’t know it if not for some throwaway lines about what a hack he is ... The novel really pays more attention to the adults in the story than the kids, to the point where the children often feel like caricatures of girls engaging in immature sadomasochism. It’s not out of line with how kids sometimes act, but is also a pretty shallow representation of this behavior and is curtailed by the parents’ involvement ... The real problem with The Mysteries happens at its climax, which is so meaningless it destroys any hope for a satisfying ending. I hoped that The Mysteries wouldn’t fall prey to the formula it set from the jump, but it did, and a little more than halfway through the story, as we are warned on the back cover, 'tragedy strikes' ... Ultimately, The Mysteries lacks imagination, because the author doesn’t trust her audience would understand anything that isn’t explicitly laid out. Ellen’s death is so on the nose for what her character was destined for because her innocence and martyrdom needs to be hammered home, lest the readers didn’t understand. With more trust between the author and her readers, The Mysteries could be strong and poignant. Without it, it consists of over-explanatory exposition that ends in disconnection and disappointment.

Silver paints an evocative picture of the early ’70s. This compelling domestic drama, with heartbreak at its center, depicts the everyday mysteries that lead up to the big one.

Two seven-year-old girls see their friendship ripped apart on one horrifying summer day in Silver’s thoughtful latest ... Silver’s attention to the parents pays off in the second half of the book, after they are transformed by a car accident on their street involving a suspected drunk driver. Silver’s unsettling study of the painful effects of change channels the bitter nostalgia of Rick Moody.

An intense story about two young girls growing up in St. Louis during an unsettled time ... Author Silver is probing grief and guilt here as well as the mysteries of fate and character ... Sentence by sentence, Silver’s writing is graceful and observant. Yet the novel doesn’t add up to much. The author portrays the accident as a turning point. Yet the grown-ups were struggling before the catastrophe, which only seems to push them further along the road they were already traveling. Miggy and Ellen are by far the freshest, liveliest characters, but the author keeps shifting focus away from them. Some parts of the novel seem truncated—Jean and Julian’s courtship, for example—while others feel too expansive. Lovely writing but airless and unsatisfying in the end.