A House Among the Trees

April 10, 2017
When famed children’s author Mort Lear falls to his death in a stubborn attempt to trim a wayward tree limb, he leaves behind an invaluable legacy of work and an even greater wealth of secrets. Glass (Three Junes) employs her trademark multilayered character studies and intricately woven time-jumping narrative to slowly unspool each thread connecting Mort’s past to the lives of those he left behind. Tomasina “Tommy” Daulair, his long-term live-in assistant and the older sister of the boy Mort’s most beloved character was modeled after, inherits everything—including the burden of explaining the last-minute change in Mort’s will to museum director Meredith Galarza, whose love for Mort’s work is only exceeded by her obsession with the man himself. Tommy’s attempts to navigate her grief and the complexities of her new duties are interrupted by an unwelcome visit from Oscar-winning actor Nicholas Greene, eager to research his next role: a biopic covering the most dramatic periods of Mort’s life. Nick, to Tommy’s dismay, arrives with fresh information about Mort’s past that shows how little she, or any of his loved ones, truly knew him. Unfortunately, Glass demonstrates more skill in building anticipation than in following through with satisfying revelations. Her use of a fragmented, narrative-hopping timeline overwhelms the characters themselves, leaving them as obscure as Mort’s secrets.

Julia Glass's tender, uncompromising novel is centered on the life and death of Mort Lear, a gay illustrator of children's books. Narrator Mary Stuart Masterson offers credible portraits of the famous man and his most famous character, Ivo; his live-in assistant, Tommy; and Nick, the actor hired to play him in the biopic. When Morty dies suddenly, making Tommy his literary executor and heir, she deals with several embarrassments and difficulties, including notifying a New York museum of Morty's retraction of a promised bequest and handling a visit from the movie's Academy Award-winning actor. Masterson allows the characters to fully emerge and gives the stories and the colors in Morty's books a shiny newness. The combination of Glass's exceptional prose and Masterson's understated performance makes this must-listening. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

November 27, 2017
A terrible attempt at a British accent for a minor character is actor Masterson’s only misstep in this otherwise winning performance. Beloved children’s literature icon Mort Lear has just died unexpectedly, leaving his longtime assistant Tomasina “Tommy” Daulair to pick up the pieces of his life, including a recently altered will and an in-progress biopic starring the British phenom Nicholas Greene. Reader Masterson excels when playing Mort in flashbacks; her gravelly and playful voice feels perfect for capturing Mort’s complicated impulsivity. She also skillfully portrays the self-doubt and crushed hopes of Meredith, the curator of a new museum devoted to children’s literature who received Mort’s verbal promises of his literary inheritance but was ultimately left in the cold. Where the performance falls short is in Masterson’s British accent for actor Nick Greene, which is awkward and inconsistent to the point of distraction. Listeners who are able to get past it will enjoy the layers of drama in this well-told story. A Pantheon hardcover.