What We Buried

The key to a truly successful mystery/detective story is the author’s clever use of misdirection, and in What We Buried, Boorman succeeds masterfully, beginning with the book’s title. If teens were asked to predict, prior to their reading the book, what the title “what” might be, I suspect many would immediately suggest bodies of murder victims or perhaps even buried treasure of some sort. And so the misdirection begins, to be continued on the book’s opening page by a transcript of a radio news report [see Excerpt] about two events that occurred in different parts of the state of Nevada, with one focusing on an arson that may also involve one or more homicides while the second notes that a local couple are missing. Though the two happenings are reported as apparently being separate events, readers will be very quickly led to link them as they meet the book’s two central characters, Lavinia “Liv” Brewer, 16, and her brother, Jory, 18.

The novel is divided into seven titled sections, and within each section, the chapters are alternately told by Liv and Jory. As the book opens, Jory and his parents, Brenda and Stephen, are arriving at the Clark County courthouse where a judge is about to render his judgment in Liv’s lawsuit against her parents. Liv is seeking both her emancipation and a large sum of money she had received from a reality show but which had been withheld from her by her parents. When the parents don’t actually appear in court, having seemingly vanished, and the court decision is delayed, Liv becomes determined to find them, convinced that they have fled to a family cabin at Walker Lake some 300 miles from Los Vegas. Somewhat reluctantly, Jory joins Liv on her quest.

Though the novel involves a physical journey, it is the sibling’s emotional journey concerning their relationship with each other and their parents that will grab readers’ interest. Jory was born with Moebius syndrome, a rare neurological disorder, which, in his case affected his sixth and seventh cranial nerves. According to the website for NORD, the National Organization for Rare Disorders: “If the 7th nerve is involved, the individual with Moebius syndrome is unable to smile, frown, pucker the lips, raise the eyebrows, or close the eyelids. If the 6th nerve is affected, the eye cannot turn outward past the midline.” Jory had had “one surgery [that] helped my left side a bit but came nowhere close to fixing my pronunciation.” The doctors had suggested further surgeries that might have led to his being able to smile, “[but] then, my parents would’ve needed to see it as an investment.”

If Jory was the “Beast” of the Brewer family, then Liv was the “investment” who was forced to play the role of “Beauty”, with Brenda acting as the “wicked” stage mother. From the age of four, Liv had been told she was beautiful, and her mother had capitalized on that beauty by repeatedly entering Liv in beauty pageants. The stress of the pageants led to Liv’s experiencing blackouts and angry tantrums, but Liv’s tantrums, however, attracted the interest of the producers of the Darling Diva’s reality show where Liv’s mercurial unpredictability made her and her mother fan favourites.

As Liv and Jory drive to the cabin, readers learn what really had been buried – childhood memories – memories of a number of past events, memories focused on their relationship with each other as well as the relationship that they had separately and together with their pageant-obsessed mother and oft-drunken and verbally abusive, business man father. Because of Boorman’s use of dual narrators, readers are privy to experiencing the memories from both Liv’s and Jory’s points of view. The pair keep circling back to a couple of events, and each time they return to a happening, more and more details are added. At the same time, they are both experiencing repeated episodes of déjà vu, all of which leads to stunning conclusion where readers again encounter the radio news transcript, but this time it completes what came after “In local news, LVPD are asking for the public’s help in locating two people who disappeared from the Clark County area Friday–”

Though Boorman deliberately utilizes misdirection, in fairness, she does warn readers, via the book’s epigraph, that she is going to do so. But then, how few adolescents, eager to get into the book’s “meat”, would pause to read, and reflect on:

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit
a rather persistent one
– Albert Einstein, maybe

And perhaps the biggest misdirection is that, in the final analysis, What We Buried really doesn’t fully merit the subject heading “Mystery and detective stories”, but, instead, should be considered a piece of quite inventive science fiction with a mystery story imbedded within it.

What We Buried is a great read, one that will definitely play with readers’ minds.