About Dogs and Deserts - Reviewing Catriona Ward's "Sundial"

Catriona Ward has the rare and a little eerie skill of rummaging around your soul and pulling out emotions you didn't know you had in that intensity in you. She then plays with that - like a cat with a mouse; misdirecting, leaving red herrings or genuine tracks for you to stumble upon in your quest to find out if and which character of hers is worthy of those strong emotions she just evoked. A kind of mindfuck, if you like. And I love it!

I was burning to read Sundial after last year's ridiculously successful The Last House on Needless Street, which had me completely head over heels. I don't remember the last time I had so much joy (but also pain) reading a book and I couldn't wait to go again through a similar experience. This was my mindset.

Before I start reviewing, let me set it straight – Sundial did not live up to that expectation. The problem with what Needless Street does (breaking and mending our hearts from one cover to the other), is that it can only work for the first time, the first cut being the deepest. So Sundial is a whole different experience, with enough new elements to make it interesting and rich as a book on its own, but also, using the same devices that were so powerfully harrowing in Needless Street, like the whole red herring thing, or little details that will make or break the story, not as strong as successor of Needless Street. 

Kids are mirrors, reflecting back everything that happens to them.

Rob is a normal suburban housewife leading a normal life with her two daughters and a more or less intact marriage when she realizes that her older daughter Callie’s weird habits like collecting animal bones or speaking to imaginary friends start getting stronger and her husband even encouraging this type of behavior. For fear of her younger daughter’s life, she takes Callie to her childhood home Sundial, a ranch in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Sundial wasn’t only her home, it was more importantly the setting for behavioral scientific experiments which mix and melt into a horrific, sad and disturbing backstory.

Although this is but a fraction of the beginning of this story, it is probably best to leave it here, because everything else will play a role in the soul searching and healing Rob needs to do confronting the place she has spent her childhood, which wasn’t an easy or comfortable one. There will be lots of twists and turns you certainly don’t expect and even one story within story which revolves around the same characters we come to know in the main story, but in different roles.

I felt that the setting of Sundial, the desert, the ranch added to the exciting background story which together with Rob and Cassie’s own present time races towards an absolute smashing, satisfying and consistent ending, added an incredible richness to this work. It’s admittedly not instantly accessible, it needs time to speak to you but once it does, it is hard to put down.

There are, on the other hand, parts that drag. But even those parts require attentive reading since Ward plays her usual game of scattering important details and clues throughout the entirety of the book. Despite this tiny pace problem, the last quarter of the book totally makes up for it, nicely tying up all lose ends. Please, be also ware that there is a lot of psychological and physical violence and abuse towards children and especially towards animals which might be disturbing for some.

Is it as good as Needless Street? Possibly. Was it a mistake to go into this book with such high hopes? Possibly. The bottom line is that if you can forget its predecessor and invest your undivided attention into Sundial, it is probably even richer and more exciting than its predecessor, and in any case worth your time.