3 out of 5

Much like how the lead character and narrator of Amanda Rea’s Faint of Heart, Nora, feels, on the whole, unremarkable…  Yeah.  You get where that’s going.

It starts intriguingly, dodging different ways when I expect the tale to aim yea-way: Nora goes to investigate her farm dog a’barkin’, only to discover a young girl hiding in the doghouse.  Dodge back to a recent get-together when two children were disappeared, absconded with by a local, disturbed teen; dodge forward to Nora telling her fiance, Roy, about what she thought about the incident and aftermath; dodge back to Nora meeting Roy; dodge forward to their breakup…

Rea writes patiently and well, allowing her reader to fill up the space of her narrative with just enough of their own imagination, guided by her confident hand setting the scene and characters, but the fitful arrangement of story pieces, as mentioned above, prevents her tale from really finding its feet.  It’s slice-of-life for Nora, and when the second half of the story jumps forward by a chunk of years, our narrator still thinking of her past, that lack of settling is understood to be purposeful, but that doesn’t really fix that the text isn’t fully engaging because of it.

Interesting to read, but – intentional or not – easy to set aside and forget.