Comment

Feb 06, 2016llwboston rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
The book tells the story of youth from multiple generations, and illustrates how the impulsive choices of young people can have dire and lifelong impact. Nell Zink is very gifted at weaving many narrative threads together and creating diverse, vibrant and wholly believable characters and a sense of how the South changed in the late 20th century. At first I was immediately drawn in by Peggy’s story, but as the book went on I found the judgmental tone of the narrator (sometimes directly telling the reader how to feel) to severely impede my enjoyment. The tone of the book changes and becomes more broadly satirical in the last third or so. In fact it began to remind me of two books, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, that both also had multiple “culture clash” storylines and satirized contemporary life. Both “Mislaid” and “White Teeth” have tidy happy-ish endings that were somewhat unconvincing. In “Mislaid” so many characters have suffered for years due to one another’s bad decisions,that the final group-wide reconciliation seemed unrealistic.