Cage of Stars

March 20, 2006
A young Mormon girl finds herself torn between retribution and forgiveness in The Deep End of the Ocean
author Mitchard's latest. Twelve-year-old Veronica "Ronnie" Swan witnesses the murder of her two sisters in her family's yard in tiny Cedar City, Utah. Murderer Scott Early is immediately apprehended, but is diagnosed with schizophrenia and ends up spending just three years in a state mental hospital. The rest of Ronnie's family turns to their faith to forgive Early, visiting him just before his release after a battery of drugs have restored him to normalcy. But Ronnie remains angry and haunted by her inability to save her sisters from him, and as she comes of age she tracks Early to San Diego, becomes an EMT, talks his wife into hiring her as a nanny for their infant daughter, and starts planning her vengeance. But as Early's life comes into focus, Ronnie's plan leads to an unexpected, if overly summative, climax. Ronnie progresses from a stock girl-next-door type to a young woman with considerable emotional depth, and Mitchard understatedly portrays her attempts to navigate romance and other interactions as a Mormon raised very "of the Church." The results are sweet and solid.

Starred review from April 1, 2006
As with Mitchard's "The Deep End of the Ocean" and "A Theory of Relativity", this latest novel explores family dynamics in the aftermath of tragedy. "Cage of Stars" is told from the perspective of a young Mormon girl, 17-year-old Veronica Swan, who relates the story of the murder of her two younger sisters and her subsequent journey to avenge their deaths and find peace. But at what price? Mitchard's novel struggles with questions of divinity and retribution by asking if it is really anyone's place to sit in judgment of others. It is a story that is at times eloquent, yet always painful to read. Readers are invited to get to know the Swans; they will be left all the more complete because of the experience. This is Mitchard's best novel to date and is an essential purchase for all public libraries." -Nanci Milone Hill, Nevins Memorial Lib., MA"

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2006
Family catastrophes are Mitchard's stock-in-trade, and the latest novel from the best-selling, Oprah-anointed author of " The Deep End of the Ocean" (1996) is no exception. The Swans are a deeply religious Mormon family living in a remote area of Utah. Twelve-year-old Veronica, "as responsible as any mother," often baby-sits her sweet little sisters while her mother works in her art studio and her father teaches English at the local high school. Engaged in a game of hide-and-seek one afternoon, Veronica emerges from the garden shed where she had been hiding to discover the dead bodies of her sisters, killed within moments of each other by a young man suffering from schizophrenia. Over the next four years, Veronica's parents operate in a haze of grief and confusion; they only start to heal when they make the momentous decision to forgive their daughters' killer, a decision that sends Veronica into an emotional tailspin. She hatches an ill-fated plan to track down the murderer who had "drenched our lives in blood." There is some calculated emotional manipulation here, and some of the characters are overly idealized. Nevertheless, Mitchard tells a compelling, even suspenseful, story; skillfully crafts an authentic narrative voice, and succeeds in humanizing the adherents of a religion that still suffers from widespread negative stereotypes. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)