Child's Play

New York Times

"Carmen Posadas, a prize-winning author who lives in Madrid, plays with expectations about a child’s capacity for innocence and evil in her new novel."

barnesandnoble.com

“Child’s Play is a pungent brew of intellectual stimulation and deep thought about the rules that bind mystery writers and readers together, and why it is necessary to wrench them apart.”

Blogcritics.com

"Child’s Play is a book to be savored, a book to be read and read again with pleasure."

Publishers Weekly

The line between fiction and reality blurs with disturbing results for Spanish mystery writer Luisa Dávila in Posadas's disappointing suspense novel. Luisa's latest mystery focuses on the strange death of a child at a Madrid private school, similar to the one where Luisa's 11-year-old daughter, Elba, is enrolled (and Luisa herself attended as a teen). She also draws on the accidental death 40 years earlier of her classmate, Antonio Gasset, who fell while playing with his twin brother Miguel, Luisa and the bewitching Sofía Márquez. Now, Sofía is a teacher at the school, and her daughter becomes Elba's best friend. When Miguel's son, who also attends the school, dies under mysterious circumstances, Luisa is alarmed by the parallels not only to her own life but to the story she's creating for her character. The similarities Posadas (The Last Resort) draws between Luisa's childhood, the fictional case and Elba's school life are frustratingly heavy-handed, leaving nothing to the reader's imagination. (Aug.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Reviews

Posadas (The Last Resort, 2005, etc.) continues her deconstruction of traditional mystery formulas with this teasing but ultimately juiceless interrogation of a fatal, suspiciously coincidental school accident. Forty years ago, Miguel Gasset's twin Antonio died, apparently by drowning in a swimming pool. Now, fate or design or maybe just coincidence has reunited Miguel with the twins' childhood friends, Sof'a Marquez and Luisa Davila. Sof'a has become a schoolteacher; her pupils include her daughter Avril, along with Luisa's daughter Elba and Miguel's son Miki, the subject of a custody battle between Miguel and a fourth wife who remains offstage. Luisa, once a children's novelist, has turned to writing a series of mysteries starring brainy, sexy Irish-Caribbean psychoanalyst Carmen O'Inns. It's only natural that someone whose livelihood depends on concocting and resolving plots would be inclined to see patterns everywhere, but it seems obvious that the death of Miki, who breaks his neck in a fall down a flight of stairs, is more than coincidence. Luisa is already wrestling with an 11-year-old who after hearing her mother tell her for years that she's adopted refuses to believe that she isn't after all. Miki's death, coming on top of the unexpected reunion of childhood friends whose shared memories are so traumatic, might have produced any number of combustible scenarios. What it produces here is a great deal of the kind of talk that owes less to Agatha Christie than to Henry James, an even greater amount of Luisa's navel-gazing, and a wide-ranging series of reflections on the relationship between fiction and life, some provocative, some as transparently self-important as late-night bullsessions in freshman dormitories. Clever, aphoristic, even philosophical, but not by any means suspenseful. Best consumed a paragraph at a time, like the I Ching.

The Barnes & Noble Review

There are two ways to approach the writing of a mystery novel: adhere to the rules, or break them with glee. It takes a mere three pages to discern that Carmen Posadas' Child's Play, falls into the latter camp. In the novel's opening paragraphs Posadas introduces Carmen O'Inns, an amateur sleuth of the Agatha Christie school (albeit with a constant need to "confirm she was looking as attractive as possible") as she's called to a private elementary school to ferret out the truth of a young boy's death by drowning. But before the reader has a chance to fall in with this familiar sort of flushed prose bordering on the cliché, Posadas pans away and redirects our attention to her proper protagonist: Luisa Davila, internationally bestselling mystery writer and potential stand-in for the author herself.

Luisa, it transpires, has her own love-hate relationship with rules and order, especially those she makes up out of whole cloth. She is prone to speeches about the Christie Formula of thrillerdom ("all the characters in the plot [should approach] the detective...one by one and alone, in order to present their version of events") or the inexplicably named "Julio Iglesias theory" ("even something that seems infallible or simple common sense turns out to be true, sometimes yes, and sometimes no"). Her two brief marriages ended in divorce; her current relationship is desultory and inconsistent, and yet Luisa dubs him the "Man of my Life"; and the conception of her only child, 12-year-old Elba, remains a secret guarded by both shame and indifference. Even her makeup strategy is a battleground between control and entropy: her age of 52 is "well-disguised by face creams and make-up by day, but at night, and with three Bloody Marys inside her, things looked very different." No wonder this figure of contradiction finds herself a semi-willing participant in the postmodernist tale Posadas sets out to tell, starting with Elba's enrolment in a school not unlike the one O'Inns happens to visit in those opening pages.

One parallel begets another, and another. Elba's school turns out to be the very one Luisa attended at the exact same age. Elba's new best friend, Avril, is the daughter of Luisa's childhood best friend, Sofia, whom she hasn't seen for 40 years. And when a young boy dies at the school in a bizarre accident, it not only mirrors the case Luisa's fictional sleuth is called to investigate but is a generational replica of the death that split Luisa from Sofia all those years earlier. Like cascading dominoes, the pieces start to fit a pattern, and Luisa herself starts to confuse her role as writer with that of her investigator, even succumbing to writer's block as she traces the line from fiction to reality and back again.

Posadas aids and abets her heroine's confusion with all manner of structural trickery. Sections from the O'Inns novel-in-progress both mirror and contradict the "real-life" narrative; a cache of printouts reveal -- but also obfuscate -- Elba's links to her classmate's death, just as they illuminate her mother's past guilt; Enrique, the aforementioned "Man of My Life," is alternately helpful and combative, keeping Luisa and her growing worries about life and art at bay even as he offers clues that seem to confirm her growing suspicions; Luisa's point of view shifts abruptly from third person to first, perhaps in keeping with Luisa's own ruminations about the subject ("[S]ome argue that a person -- you, me, anyone -- is not a well-defined object, but is simply what other people see and believe him or her to be. This, by the way, is the reason why most writers prefer to tell stories in the first person, because that is the way we see life: from the unique, subjective eye of our own point of view"). Even the pool of suspects, from Elba to Sofia to Luisa's long-ago classmate Miguel, now returned in the guise of a lothario-in-the-making, take their scripted dialogue and make a mockery of the process.

"Everybody writes their own story," Luisa muses early on in the narrative. "What else are they supposed to write about? That's not the problem; the problem arises if you don't realize you're doing it. The problem is when you're too blind to see." Though Child's Play is ultimately more concerned with subverting storytelling expectations and satirizing the expected trajectory of traditional mystery, Posadas does embed some insights about the writer's responsibility to the reader. Children are murdered, and yet the action happens offstage, veiled by a sepia-like haze that minimizes the sense of horror the reader ought to feel. But because Luisa has ensnared herself in a web of conspiracy and over-patterning, has she -- and by extension, the reader -- lost the thread of empathy and humanity? Never mind that O'Inns and Posadas share a first name, that Luisa and Posadas share a profession (and similar success in their native Spain), that Posadas herself has written mysteries of a traditional bent, including the culinary-themed Little Indiscretions and a modern-day update of the classic locked-room puzzle, Last Resort.

Child's Play (or Juego de ni?os in the original Spanish) is the mirror reflection of its title, a complex retelling of what would be a simple tale in the hands of an author of lesser ambition. As a result, for those not inclined towards post-modernist narrative games, the novel can be a frustrating read because it doesn't promise resolution -- and, in fact, actively disdains one, even as all the strands tie together in the pattern Luisa desperately craves. But for those who are suspicious by nature and follow another character's dictum that "you should never trust what you imagine, nor even what you see," Child's Play is a pungent brew of intellectual stimulation and deep thought about the rules that bind mystery writers and readers together, and why it is necessary to wrench them apart. --Sarah Weinman

Sarah Weinman reviews crime fiction for the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun and blogs about the genre at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind (http://www.sarahweinman.com).