Katherine Carlyle

August 17, 2015
In Thomson’s (Secrecy) wonderfully written novel, London native Katherine “Kit” Carlyle is a headstrong, fanciful, and flighty 19-year-old living in Rome. Her father, David, is a roving CNN journalist who was largely an absent parent, and her mother, Stephanie, died of cancer six years previously. Having landed a scholarship to study at Oxford University, Kit obsesses over the fact that she is an IVF baby: she was stored for eight years as an embryo before she was implanted in Stephanie. Kit feels as if David blames her for causing Stephanie’s cancer by the IVF procedure, so Kit decides to run away and come to terms with her own identity. Kit travels to Berlin to stay with the orthodontist Klaus Frings, demonstrating her uncanny knack for meeting a series of helpful, generous strangers. All the while, she enjoys fantasizing about the scenes of her frantic, desperate father searching for her, and she even arranges rendezvous with him, which she doesn’t attend. She calls herself Misty and leaves Berlin to stay in Moscow, adding another layer of deception to her vanishing act. Thomson’s seamless prose style and striking minor characters round out this satisfying, offbeat narrative.

August 1, 2015
A young woman sets out to find the isolation she craves in Thomson's (Secrecy, 2014, etc.) picaresque novel. The 19-year-old title character retains vague memories of being an IVF embryo. Her mother's death and the perpetual absence of her father, a CNN reporter, contribute to a life in which being solitary is the natural state. To bring her physical circumstance into concert with her psychic state, Katherine, a few weeks before she's due to enter Oxford, cleans out her bank accounts and, without telling anyone, takes off for stark and increasingly bleak surroundings culminating in a remote island in northern Russia. Unlike the hero of her favorite film, Antonioni's The Passenger, Katherine wants less to start over than to exist in a state of anonymity. For Thomson, Katherine's quest is an understandable reaction to a digital world that's both intrusive and disconnected. But though her voice achieves a consistent tone of blank angst, Katherine feels more a construct than a character. Worse, the intrusive passages in which she imagines her father's attempts to find her threaten to make her flight seem an adolescent stunt. The finish, in which Thomson brings together all the book's strands, is a technical feat and, because of the cruelty to which he subjects Katherine and the triteness of the denouement, both homiletic and sadistic. A book that promises insight into the emotional detachment of our current technological overload should deliver more than the resolution of daddy issues.

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October 1, 2015

Conceived in a fertility lab where she languished for eight years before being implanted in her mother's womb, Katherine Carlyle has never gotten over the long period of absence. That sense of loss deepens after her mother dies from ovarian cancer, which may have been caused by her IVF treatments. Katherine takes her resentment out on her father, a globe-trotting journalist, when she decides to cut herself off from him and from everyone else in her life. Instead of leaving for Oxford University as planned, she erases all traces of herself and reroutes to Berlin in search of a man she has only heard discussed by strangers in a movie theater. After briefly connecting with him, she moves on to other random men until she obtains a Russian visa and heads for Ugolgrad, a remote outpost in the frozen north. VERDICT Katherine Carlyle is an oddly compelling heroine whose eccentric disappearing act becomes a journey of self-discovery. This is a novel with panache.--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2015
Katherine, better known as Kit, is expected to begin her college studies at Oxford, but with her father busy reporting in distant countries, who really cares what she does with her life? Instead, she leaves her home in Rome to pursue a man in Germany whose name and address she overheard in a cinema. From there, she follows a string of coincidences to the far reaches of the earth, seeking a new life that will remove her from the memories of her mother's death and punish her father for his seeming indifference. With every step she takes farther from home, though, she wonders what her father will do when he finds her missing and if he'll try to find her. Ostensibly a journey in search of solitude, Kit's increasingly reckless path lays bare the truth about her flight, that the act of running away may actually be a plea for being found. Thomson's simply stated prose is made richer by the flaws of Kit's character, resulting in an honest and worthy story of self-discovery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)