Case Histories: Kate Atkinson

This was an interesting and original detective story. It compares 3 case studies, the first happening in 1970, the second in 1994, and the third in 1979. The story weaves in and out between the three stories, put in a linear order like a timeline. In the first Story, Rosemary, has 4 daughters and is pregnant. She dislikes being a mother and loathes her children, with the exception of Olivia- the baby. She knows she has a favorite and that she loves Olivia with a strange ferociousness, but she can't help but favor her. One day she lets one of the other girls sleep in a tent outside with Olivia. In the morning Olivia has vanished. The second story is about a widower with two daughters. He also has a favorite daughter, Laura, and he also knows he shouldn't favor one child over the other, but Laura is a loveable person. He gets her a job at his office and goes to a meeting in the morning promising to be back in the office to eat lunch with her. Throughout the morning he envisions his coworkers loving her, but when he gets to work, the office is in mayhem. He learns a crazed client had come in a killed a coworker and when he reared back with the knife and accidently got Laura in the neck. The third story is about a stressed out mother who may be suffering from postpartum depression and a loveless marriage. She had finally gotten the baby to sleep when her husband came in with wood for the fire, dropping it and waking up the baby. The mother snapped and grabbed the ax, killing her husband. Her last thoughts in the chapter are wishing she could start her life over because she would have remained in school. The three cases are all brought to the same private investigator, who just opened his own practice after his wife left him. The book is sad; however there is a lot of humor in it. The detective, Jackson, has all sorts of horrible things happen to him and the way he sees the other characters in the book is amusing as well. He is saved by a black cat (one of his deceased clients had named Nigger) because he saw him outside and went to retrieve him, but as he started back to the house it exploded. Jackson seems to solve all the mysteries (and is left everything from the elderly client that died), but you never get to know if Tanya is ever identified and reintroduced to her aunt. I had some trouble keeping the characters straight especially when new characters were introduced. In the end everyone in the story seems to come into the lives of the other characters. The last few chapters go back to the time of the death for each case and finish them as they happen so you know exactly what happen. The stories are all shocking. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book "Country children used to walk five miles to school in the morning and five miles home at night without complaining. Or perhaps they did complain, but no one ever recorded their comments for posterity." (pg. 92) “It wasn't that Theo believed in religion, or God, or an afterlife. He just knew it was impossible to feel this much love and for it all to end." "...at least she had triceps, unlike Amelia, who had the kind of swinging underarm flesh that would have made it easy for her to glide among the treetops" (207)