“Losing one child changed them. Losing two children might destroy them. And their
marriage.”
Only ten months after the death of her daughter, Sienna again experiences the heartbreak of
losing a child when she discovers her son Kai in their backyard treehouse, not breathing,
apparently from huffing paint. Despite her heroic efforts to revive him, which involve carrying
him down from the treehouse and performing CPR, she discovers she is too late.
Meanwhile, after failing to impress his prospective boss and win a place at a real estate agency,
Sienna’s husband Jordan decides to drown out his sorrow with bourbon. Intoxicated, he
accidentally assaults another man, leading to him spending the night in prison, oblivious to the
death of his son.
As the enormity of the couple’s grief unfolds, Sienna and Jordan must grapple with grief, loss,
and the details of a mystery that threatens Sienna’s sanity: Was she negligent in the deaths of
her children, or is there a greater evil at work here?
Like any novel, Deciduous lives and dies by the acting of its principal characters. Sienna and
Jordan are active and emotional, agents of change for good or ill. They, more than their
circumstances, drive the story forward, and their flaws provide the story’s depth. Jordan, the
ambitious career man, works to keep the media at bay and protect his wife from the
investigators’ suspicions. Sienna, the compassionate mother, tries to make sense of the details
of her children’s deaths, even as she begins blaming herself for losing them.
The rest of the characters, however, are less memorable. With the exception of Yvonne, a
friendly neighbor who is a steadying presence in Sienna’s life throughout the story, many of the
characters have few or no characteristics beyond their role. We learn almost nothing about their
backstories, leaving them to seem more like cogs in the machine than living, breathing people
with their own lives and interests.
The greatest shortcoming of the book, however, is the suspense. Despite the atmosphere of
mystery, the danger threatening Sienna and her family remains nebulous throughout much of
the book. Instead the plot concerns itself with Sienna’s own grief, the details of the investigation,
dream sequences about Sienna’s children, and confrontations with nosy reporters. It feels at
times as if the story cannot decide whether it is a thriller or a family drama, and so commits to
neither.
As disappointed as I was by the lack of clues, however, I enjoyed the twists and turns toward
the end of the book. In that sense, it felt much like a slow-burner. The mystery is there, and
there were just enough tantalizing clues to make me doubt my assumptions about the plot. I just
wasn’t always sure where I was going.
If you enjoy family dramas with intense emotion and a complex mystery, give Deciduous a try.
It’s sure to take you off the beaten path. It just might take you a bit farther into the wilderness
than you had expected.