Complex Characters & Dark Secrets

Close Your Eyes  by Amanda Eyre Ward

If you love complex characters, vivid imagery, and dark, haunting secrets, Close Your Eyes will not disappoint. The book is Austin, Texas-based author Amanda Eyre Ward's fifth. I've been a fan since her first novel, Sleep Toward Heaven, was released in 2003.

On her website, Ward shares that the idea behind Close Your Eyes began to form in 1989 after terror struck near her sleepy, idyllic hometown: a husband and wife had been stabbed to death in their own bedroom one New Year's Eve. The crime went unsolved for nearly five years until a local teenage boy confessed to the killings. During his trial, he cited no concrete memories of the incident, blaming his actions on an alcoholic stupor.

In the author's own words, "I thought about the murder from time to time, trying to understand how a stranger had broken the spell of Rye, smashed through the safety we had all thought money could buy … I wanted not only to understand what happened … but also to create a world where this wrong was righted, and a broken town was sewn back together."

Close Your Eyes begins with a neighborhood celebration ruined by senseless tragedy. Six-year old Lauren and eight-year old Alex Mahdian wake up to discover their mother has been murdered; the brother and sister soon find out their father is the prime suspect.

When the children's father is convicted of the murder, Lauren and Alex move in with their grandparents. Years later, Alex goes to Harvard and becomes a physician, while Lauren pursues a career as a real estate agent. When Alex volunteers for a Doctors without Borders assignment in Iraq, Lauren's tenuous coping mechanisms splinter apart. While attempting to ignore her incarcerated father's existence, she avoids commitment to her long-time boyfriend, and spirals into greater depths of anxiety, anger, and grief over her family's tragedy.

Ward introduces two new characters, Sylvia and Victoria, in Part 2. Though it isn't apparent at first, the girls are linked to Lauren and Alex's lives in unimaginable ways. With deft expertise, Ward weaves the four lives together throughout the rest of the story, sewing together bits of connection with every chapter of this complicated, heart wrenching novel of loss and redemption.

For more on Amanda Eyre Ward, visit her website: www.amandaward.com.

           Hardcover: 272 pages

            Publisher: Random House (July 26, 2011)

            Language: English

            ISBN-10: 0345494482