The Suspension Bridge - Anna Dowdall - ★★★.¾

AUTHOR: Anna Dowdall

GENRE: Literary crime drama

PUBLICATION DATE: October 15, 2024

RATING: 3.75 stars.

In a Nutshell: A historical crime novel written in a literary character-oriented style. Interesting characters, good writing, slow pace, unusual approach to an otherwise usual plot. Recommended but not to all.

Plot Preview:

1962. Twenty-nine-year-old Sister Harriet has just taken a teaching position in Saint Reginald’s Academy, an elite boarding school for girls, set in the fictional river city of Bonthonville in Canada. Bonthonville is currently in the news for the ongoing construction of the world’s largest suspension bridge, but soon, a new event dominates the headlines: a mysterious disappearance of students from the academy. While Harriet is already battling her inner demons about the solidity of her faith, these incidents stress her shaky self-identity even further.

The story comes to us in the third-person perspective of various characters, but mostly from Harriet’s pov.

Bookish Yays:

🌉 Though there are many nuns and priests in the story, it is not at all religious or preachy. Rather, the plot reveals the human side of the religious, with their frailties and insecurities.

🌉 As a character-oriented narrative, the story has quite a few interesting characters who are tough to comprehend. Their portrayal doesn’t go down the typical path, so I enjoyed trying to guess their actions and reactions. The only thing common to most was that they were dominated by their egos and desires than by common sense and duty.

🌉 Sister Harriet deserves a separate yay. A complex character, she is a one-of-a-kind fictional nun, having ended up choosing the vocation not out of piety or a calling but out of having no other choice. Her doubts about her faith make her an intriguing central character.

🌉 The title and the cover might indicate a physical bridge, but there are multiple bridges throughout the book: literal and metaphorical. There is the construction of the suspension bridge, and all the politics that goes behind the design. The higher leaders of the church want a say in the bridge design to make sure it's “leading people to God.” Harriet has strange dreams about bridges. At the academy where Harriet works, a science project focusses on making model bridges. There are also myriad intangible bridges between characters based on their wealth, gender, and social status, with not all of the gaps being “bridged.”

🌉 There is a subtle humour through remarks and observations, though the content isn’t really LOL funny. It’s somewhat satirical.

🌉 The vocabulary! 🤯 I had to use my Kindle dictionary so many times!

🌉 A shoutout to that eye-catching cover art. I always love it when indie/small press offerings get the cover right.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🌊 While the blurb marks this as a literary whodunit, the crime itself is more in the background for a major chunk of the novel. The narrative focusses not on the crime and not even on those directly connected to the crime such as the immediate family or the suspects. Instead, we get to know the details mainly through characters such as Harriet, who are on the periphery of the situation. The effect is akin to bystanders who know someone gruesome is happening but still need to go on with their lives. This is handled well enough with plenty of surprising twists and reveals, but it might disappoint those looking for a traditional crime investigation story.

🌊 While literary fiction is anyway slow-paced, this book is almost sluggish at the start with many characters and a lot of description. It took me a long while to get gripped by the writing because of this relaxed tempo. The pacing does improve later, though it never becomes truly fast.

🌊 The ending does offer satisfaction for most of the arcs and leaves no threads dangling. But I would have liked some more detailing on a couple of the major plot points that reveal the whats but not the whys.

Bookish Nays:

⛵ Though the story is set in 1962, it doesn’t *feel* historical, partly because the focus is more on the people and their flaws, and partly because the atmosphere of the setting is not detailed much. The only obvious evidence of the era is the lack of any mention of technological devices.

⛵ While the prologue does create a good start for the story, I do not prefer a prologue simply being a scene from later in the book. Moreover, the chosen content not just creates a sense of impending doom but also drops major hints about what might be the reason behind the same. So it is somewhat like a spoiler to an event that comes almost at the end of the book.

Bookish Doubt:

🤔 I am not sure why the cover declares this to be "A Sister Harriet Mystery." Is this the first of a planned mystery series? If yes, I don't quite see how Sister Harriet can lead the investigation as she wasn't in that role in this story. If no, the tagline is somewhat confusing. 

All in all, this is an interesting story that takes the literary approach seriously and offers us an unusual character-oriented crime story. I always find it amazing when authors choose to take the road not taken and explore ordinary topics in an extraordinary way.

Recommended to readers with a literary bent of mind and with a fondness for character-oriented storylines. This Canadian indie work might not be a traditional whodunnit but as a literary work revealing the flaws of humans caught in exceptional circumstances, it shines bright.

My thanks to River Street Writing for a complimentary copy of “The Suspension Bridge”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.