The Thin Place (First Edition)

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.

The thin place is a Celtic term used to describe the diaphanous realm where the spiritual and physical worlds combine. In her lyrically brilliant sixth novel (after Versailles, 2002), Kathryn Davis imagines a town rooted in the thin place. Every living thing is intricately connected here: humans, animals, and vegetables all have their say. Critics admit the novel is difficult to summarize, but all commend the powerful poetry in Davis's loopy, mystical examination of time, morality, and everyday joys. What it lacks in page-turning plot—one exists, but it is secondary—is trumped by the revelatory narrative voices.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Starred Review. Davis stretches relationships over centuries and species in this loopy follow-up to her historical, Versailles. When three schoolgirls come upon a seemingly dead neighbor, Mr. Banner, prostrate on the beach, he is revived by the uncanny spiritual powers of one of the girls, Mees Kipp, a strange fatherless waif who is also able to communicate with dogs. The narrative's point-of-view jumps among various characters (including a dog) as Davis explores the teeming, deceitful, hidden lives of the small church-going community and teases out its history via the journal of a late 19th-century schoolmarm who harbors a secret passion. (She perished with her pupils in what has become known as the Sunday School Outing Disaster; the 1870s tragedy still haunts the town.) Meanwhile, in the Crockett Home for the Aged, sharp-witted Helen Zeebrugge, at 92, simmers at the stupidity and condescension of her caretakers; her only son, Piet, in his vigorous 60s, is looking for wife number five and is tired of dating the athletic French teacher at the high school. With her eye on Piet, 50-ish divorcée Billie Carpenter, new to town and unattached, possesses the clarity to grasp the larger supernatural realignment that's taking place in Varennes, as evil (or senseless mortality) is replaced by a life-affirming force: love. (Jan.)
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In the opening pages of this brilliant, peculiar book, three small-town girls discover a man's corpse at the edge of a lake, and one of them, Mees Kipp, mysteriously brings him back to life. Davis writes hallucinatory, literate prose, and adopts a cosmic perspective: she is concerned with nothing less than describing the town's every waking moment. The experiences of Mees's dog, trotting through a clearing that smells of porcupine, stand alongside those of a minister's wife reading her morning paper and "confronting whatever form the devil had chosen to assume overnight." In any other book, a magical resurrection would be a central event; for Davis, it's just another moment in a particular place.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

*Starred Review* Cosmic in her vision, provocative and comic in her storytelling, 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. Here, following her unusual historical novel Versailles (2002), she depicts a small town along the Canadian border on a glacier-carved terrain encompassing the aptly named Black Lake and teeming with beavers, bugs, birds, dogs, cats, and grasses. Three girls come across a man lying on the beach, seemingly dead. Two go for help, one stays. The man recovers. This girl has unusual powers. Davis' wry, sometimes gleeful, sometimes gloomy omniscient narrator turns her attention to a woman restoring a diary from 1872 kept by a schoolteacher responsible for a terrible tragedy. Davis then tunes in to the consciousness of Helen--smart, classy, and impatient with life in a home for the aged, her handsome son, the two women he is involved with, various animals wild and domestic, and even plants. As strange and deadly events unfold, Davis works out a calculus of the accidental and the inevitable and maps the interface of the natural and the supernatural, the human and the divine. Donna Seaman
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