In this stunning first novel, White weaves stories within stories while keeping the thrilling mystery alive ... White's tightly woven debut thriller has already won the Victorian Premier Literary Award in Australia; its arrival Stateside comes highly recommended.
White is a sparse but talented writer, his sharp lines cutting the page like knives. With few details he paints vivid scenes ... Sometimes his scenes are so striking they read like frames from a movie, which makes sense, because White is also a screenwriter ... Deftly plotted, with believable characters, The Nowhere Child is a satisfying mystery by a talented new voice in the genre.
White has written a 'returning-to-your-southern-roots' tale with a difference; Kim is exploring roots she never knew she had, and the journey is as bumpy and fraught with bewildered feelings as readers might imagine. While secondary characters are not as developed as Kim, this worthwhile story of a woman’s quest for the truth will work with women’s-fiction readers as well as mystery fans.
With such a bold premise, it would be disappointing if the answer were straightforward, but The Nowhere Child is anything but, with chilling facts that continue to destabilise the narrative right until the end ... Some of the dramatic moments could have benefited from a little understatement and too often the language resorts to cliche, but sometimes [White} manages a description that illustrates his talent ... The tale itself is farfetched, but White manages it expertly, with some sophisticated plotting. Crucially, too, his characters have depth and complexity, and they run the gamut of age, personality type and background – they are as varied as they are interesting ... Kim's story is compelling because there's a possibility that it could be true.
Outstanding ... By juxtaposing past and present, the author keeps the tension high. The impatient may be tempted to skip ahead, but they shouldn’t. Thriller fans will want to savor every crumb of evidence and catch every clue. White is definitely a writer to watch.
Among the too-many plot threads are members of a snake-handling fundamentalist church and guilt about what several characters did or didn’t do. In this debut, the author tries to build tension, but everything from lazy writing (one person “chortled”—who ever chortles?) to the constant back-and-forth chapters defeats that goal ... By the end of all the melodramatic twists, readers will have a hard time sustaining any interest in the protagonist, her relations, or her revelations.
