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    The Thin Place
    The Thin Place
    The Thin Place
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Thin Place

    Written by Kathryn Davis

    Narrated by Shelly Frasier

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The prize-winning author of Versailles tells the story of a small New England village unsettled by a young girl's unearthly gift. In Varennes, a town near the Canadian border, three girls come across the body of a dead man on the local lake's beach. Two of them run to get help, but twelve-year-old Mees Kipp stays with the body and somehow, inexplicably, brings it back to life. Her mysterious gift is at the center of this haunting and transcendent novel. The Thin Place is the story of these girls, their town, and the worldly and otherworldly forces that come into play there over one summer. Writing at the peak of her powers, Kathryn Davis draws on commonplace forms-police blotters, garden almanacs, Sunday sermons, horoscopes, and diaries-to convey the rich rhythms of life in Varennes. From the ladies in the old-folks' home to trappers, lawyers, teachers, ministers, drug addicts-even the dogs and cats, beavers and bears-she peoples this novel with astonishingly vivid beings. The extraordinary comes to visit an ordinary town.

    "A delightful, surprise-filled narrative: Davis's best yet."-Kirkus Review(starred review)

    "Cosmic in her vision, provocative and comic in her storytelling, Kathryn Davis draws on sources as diverse as quantum physics and tales of saints and miracles and makes place a key element in her exploratory fiction."-Booklist (starred review)

    "Never has Davis' prose seemed more effortless...The Thin Place is a bright, shimmering book."-Chicago Sun-Times
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateFeb 15, 2006
    ISBN9781400172214
    The Thin Place
    Author

    Kathryn Davis

    Kathryn Davis is the author of six novels. She has received the Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. She teaches at Washington University, and lives in Vermont and St. Louis, Missouri.

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    Reviews for The Thin Place

    3.5/5

    11 ratings9 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A lot of pretty, thoughtful writing. But none of the human characters made much of an impact on me. The animal and vegetable ones, however... In general, I liked her bird's eye view of the town, but sometimes the conceit got a little labored.
    • 5/5
      The first book of 2008 I've fallen for.

      I'm short on time to review. I'll say this, if you at least get the chance to hold the book in your hand, the praises given on the back of the book are not exaggerations or mere cliches. The book DOES have a certain magic, life and originality that I haven't come across often.
    • 4/5
      Saturday, December 5, 2009Random thoughts, think, think, don't emerge from your mind, just concentrate. Haven't most of us done this when we were trying to avoid some other thought or action? This is the feeling I got when I first started reading this mystical, entertaining, yet odd book. I was uncertain where it was going, or perhaps especially, where it was coming from. That said, there is a story here, three young girls on the threshold of leaving childhood, a unique small town population, a church, beavers, a dog, and an unexpected mystic healer are enfolded in this book, not to mention mystery, drama, death and life. The main theme is probably that of how people relate to each others and to themselves.In between the segments of the story of the girls are bits and pieces of small-town or rural lives and how such lives are intermingled with each other as well as the forests and animals. I really got into it fairly quickly and found myself wrapped up in life in the thin space. The author works on a different plane than the average writer, and this is what makes the story interesting and totally unexpected. A difficult book to review because it is so different. Somehow for that reason, I feel I may not have done justice to Kathryn Davis; I keep feeling compelled to read it again, I think I will get a lot more out of it in reading it again. The book has many layers, and a twist at the end. As of my first reading, I give it 4 stars.
    • 4/5
      At times nearly perfect, at times rather frustrating. The novel encompasses more than just its characters, it's also their pets, the lake, the place itself. And Davis's writing is often just perfect. But sometimes the rambling meditations get a little old. And there are an awful lot of characters to keep track of for such a small book.
    • 4/5
      Davies is an unusual writer--kind of creepy and provocative at the same time... she introduces you to a normal kind of small town setting and then tells you what the dogs are thinking, and how the family of beavers in the town lake are dealing with environmental changes...you actually get the beavers' perspective, along with regular people and their everyday thoughts and reactions to things. It's very interesting.
    • 4/5
      I started out not enjoying this book, then decided it was quite interesting, but the last chapter ruined it all for me. The story of a young girl who has the gift of bringing people back from the dead is interspersed with the stories of others who are intimately linked to her life by virtue of living in a small town. Davis uses the ephemera of daily living... the police log, a long dead teacher's journal, nature almanac and horoscopes... to detail the events of one summer in a small New England town. She also pulls in all sorts of religious iconography to add to the mysticism. The climax is abrupt, especially after so slow a build up, but that didn't bother me as such an event would be abrupt in reality. What bothers me is the climax leads to a too quick ending that neatly ties up lives that would have been better left to the reader's imagination.
    • 3/5
      Many times during the reading of this book - I considered putting it down and getting rid of it. It's not exactly an easy read - and I can't say that I was very engrosed in it - nor was I especially concerned about finding out how it ended. I had a hard time keeping track of who was who...but when I was in a character's mind - I did enjoy being there. I liked seeing, smelling, feeling the world through someone else's senses. Though the flow of action was hard for me to get a grip on - the flow of the world, the feel of the season (summer) was very vivid. This is the 2nd book of Davis's that I've read - and as with the first one (The Walking Tour) - I spend most of the time feeling lost and as if I am walking around with blinders on - but what I can see is like a painting; true to life but larger than life. Dripping with color and texture and emotion, Davis's books are easy for me to appreciate but far more difficult to lose myself in.
    • 2/5
      Multiple perspectives can do wonderful things for a narrative. When it's done well, it can help flesh out the story and give the reader more insights than can be garnered from a single character. When it's done poorly, or haphazardly, multiple perspectives only serve to impede the flow of the story, and can confuse the reader. Such is the case here, where Davis gives us the perspective of many characters, including several of the pets in the small town in which her story is set. Here, the multiple perspectives have the effect of muddying the waters so that the reader can never gets a clear picture of any of the characters and can never know what's important to the story.It's too bad that Davis never lets any one character's story come through fully, because she gives us several interesting threads. One character can bring people and animals back to life, but only under certain circumstances. What circumstances? How does she feel about her ability? Occasionally we feel as though we may be getting close to delving deeper into one perspective, but than Davis tears the story away to another character, or perhaps gives us a horoscope or something from the local police blotter. The effect is a very jerky, frustrating read.
    • 2/5
      Every once in awhile, I try to pick out random books that I would not normally read. Sometimes they turn out to be quite a pleasant surprise, other times... not so much.I would definitely have to say that "The Thin Place" would fall into the latter category.It was a jumbled, disorderly rant of scattered mess. I often felt that I was trying in vain to put together a puzzle while reading this one. Davis seemed to take nothing seriously - a cat coming home to some cream seemed to be just as important and focused upon as someone being raised from the dead. I thought that there were too many characters - and none of them did I ever come to understand. I thought that the little girl who could raise people (and animals) from the dead sounded interesting, but right from the first scene, she proves just as lifeless as all the others. Sometimes I could *almost* get a sense of what I think the author was trying to achieve - a hazy, quirky whimsical aura. Let me stress - almost. This book is unique, that's for sure. I would not go so far as to say that is badly written, but I can say for sure that it was not my type of reading, and one that I was glad to finish and put straight into my discard pile.