Vengeance Is Mine

A family drama of faith and forgiveness pitted against revenge and retribution.

CAGE OF STARS

A Novel

By Jacquelyn Mitchard

Warner. 289 pp. $24.95

Several years ago I heard an editor make this seemingly incomprehensible remark: "Don't bother with prologues. Nobody reads them." My author's mind reeled. How can you skip a prologue? It wouldn't exist in the finished text if it were not important, if it were not the correct place to begin.

Enter Jacquelyn Mitchard's Cage of Stars , a novel by the author of The Deep End of the Ocean that begs to be read from Chapter One. From that point on, the story is nearly flawless. This is not to suggest that her prologue isn't a strong beginning. But it's a strong beginning for the wrong novel. This story does not -- and should not -- proceed as promised. "You can start a story anywhere you want," Mitchard's narrator observes. I suggest that this freedom applies to the reader as well.

Veronica "Ronnie" Swan launches Chapter One with this strong, simple sentence: "At the moment when Scott Early killed Becky and Ruthie, I was hiding in the shed."

She wasn't hiding in fear. Already a trusted and capable baby-sitter at age 12, she was playing hide and seek with her much younger sisters. Her parents had left her in charge. "Where we lived," she says of her Mormon family, "wasn't even really a town. It was a sort of settlement, for people like my father, who always said he liked his 'elbow room.' " She thought her sisters were outside counting to 50, or to 100, and when they didn't call out, she assumed they'd gotten confused and started over. It was their silence, not any sense of horror, that caused her to open the door of the shed.

"And I saw my sisters," Ronnie says, "lying there like little white dolls in great dark pools of paint. I saw Scott Early, a young man with short blond hair, sitting on the picnic table, wearing only his boxers and a dirty T-shirt, sobbing as if they were his little sisters, as if a terrible monster had come along and done this."

Mitchard's prose shines though the simple voice of a child. In Ronnie's narrative hands, the reader can almost touch the sisters. "[Becky's] teeth were purple from the berries she'd eaten for breakfast," she says. "Becky was as thin and fast as a minnow in a creek and seemed to live practically on air. Ruthie was as round and 'slalom' as a little koala bear. Her favorite thing was to eat cookie dough right from the bowl." Even as Ronnie brings them alive for us, she cautions us not to assume ownership. They were her sisters and nobody else's. She earns a strange reputation in the media for screaming at the crowds who stand in front of their house, holding candles and singing "Amazing Grace." "Ruthie and Becky were ours, and why did other people get to feel good about themselves, singing and crying over my sisters they never knew?"

Early portions of the story deal almost exclusively with survivor's guilt and the grief of unbearable loss. This is much-trodden territory, but the author keeps it fresh simply by rendering every beat, every ordinary moment in the aftermath of the tragedy with the clear bell tone of human truth.

Mitchard then delivers another emotional and moral twist: a decision by the parents -- several years later -- to forgive Scott Early. Sounds hard to imagine, but their reasoning feels essentially sound, and Early is, arguably, a forgivable killer. A gentle (albeit severely mentally ill) young man who would never harm a soul while on his medication, he finds his life shattered by guilt over the murders, which he cannot remember. Trouble is, he's released only four years later. This hardly repays his debt, and one can't fail to dread the potential consequences. His wife stays with him against the odds and quickly becomes pregnant with their first child. In this framework, a premise that could have been disappointingly simplistic is anything but. It's a setup with no easy answers.

Ronnie cannot and will not forgive. She moves to San Diego at an early age and studies to become an emergency medical technician, all in the context of stalking the Early family. Soon she is a trusted nanny to Juliet, the beautiful baby girl of the killer and his wife, and the suspense of watching her plans unfold makes the book nearly impossible to set down.

Cage of Stars has everything good fiction needs: ably crafted characters, a taut sense of suspense and a lot to say about a world of tough emotional choices. If the dialogue often makes everyone seem too bald and forthcoming in articulating his or her emotional landscape, this is fairly easily overlooked.

The ending is far more believable and satisfying than the ending we were duped into anticipating by the troublesome prologue. At best, the sleight of hand is an unnecessary device. At worst, it is a breach of trust that mars an otherwise satisfying reading experience. But Cage of Stars is a worthwhile and compelling read, a novel that has all the elements of good storytelling and needs only to believe that this is enough. ·

Catherine Ryan Hyde is the author of seven published novels, including "Pay It Forward," "Electric God," "Becoming Chloe" and "Love in the Present Tense."