The Accidental

Author Ali Smith gets full use of a quintet of readers who perform their roles impeccably. Stina Nielsen, Jeff Woodman, Simon Prebble, and Ruth Moore take on the roles as members of the Smart family, whose lives are decimated when a mysterious young woman named Amber (played by Heather O'Neill) enters their home, seemingly by accident. The book has a nonlinear structure and an ambiguous ending. It retells the same incident from the points of view of the philandering father, the clueless mother, the guilt-ridden teenaged son, and the rebellious pre-teen daughter. Stina Nielsen deserves to be singled out for her portrayal of 12-year-old Astrid. She has just the right touches of arrogance and innocence to bring the girl to life. M.S. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

January 30, 2006
Heather O'Neill plays Amber, a mysterious stranger who wangles her way into the lives of a vacationing English family spending the summer in a remote cottage. O'Neill reads with studious detachment and a persistent air of mischief, as if the entire story is a particularly juicy practical joke. Given Amber's predilection for wreaking havoc in her new adopted family's comfortably misguided lives, the emotion is supremely apropos. O'Neill is joined by a cast of performers, including Ruth Moore as the perpetually harried, perpetually preoccupied Eve, who spends all her time dreaming of the characters of the latest historical novel she's writing, and Stina Nielsen as Astrid, a 12-year-old with a frightening imagination and a propensity for recording the world on her video camera. The bulk of the book, though, is read by O'Neill, who provides a suitably nuanced reading, at times placid, at times flashing an air of free-floating menace. It is her work, above all, that brings Smith's novel to fully fleshed existence.Simultaneous release with the Pantheon hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 31).