Call Me Evie comes recommended “for fans of Room by Emma Donoghue, and Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn“. Across two different settings (“Before” in Melbourne, Australia, and “After” in a coastal small town in New Zealand), the story follows a seventeen-year-old girl trying to piece together her memories of what happened the night everything changed.
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In the “After”, a man who the narrator calls Jim has shaved her head, and taken photographs of her in her underwear. He tells her that he is protecting her from herself. He won’t let her go out alone, he keeps her away from any device that might connect to the internet, and he locks her in her bedroom for extended periods. When they’re in public, he calls her Evie.
In the “Before”, her name was Kate. She was a fairly normal seventeen-year-old girl (albeit one with a dead mother and a father who is a semi-famous retired footballer). She had a troublemaker best friend and a crush on a boy called Thom. But some kind of incident occurred that led this man – Jim – to take her across the ocean and obscure her identity.
It’s never quite clear just how much “Evie” remembers about the incident that “Kate” was involved in. Sometimes, she seems quite sure about her vague recollections. Other times, she’s not sure she can remember anything at all. She finds pop psychology books in Jim’s bedroom, with passages underlined about implanting false memories, so she has good reason not to trust her own mind – and, obviously, excellent reason not to trust Jim. Still, she’s unwavering in her desire to escape, and she wants to go home.
The pacing of Call Me Evie is pretty uneven. The mystery is tantalising, but the first half felt quite slow, with just the tiniest drops of plot development here and there – before a veritable flood of information in the second half.
The ‘unreliable narrator’ bit is also somewhat clumsily done, especially in comparison to the recommended equivalent titles (Room and Sharp Objects). The revelations of what each character knows, and how they acted in the aftermath of the incident (not to mention the incident itself), feel inconsistent and slapped together. I suspect the root of this problem is in the characters themselves; they simply aren’t developed enough for the emotional truth of their motivations to be clear for the reader, which makes it difficult to empathise or understand.
The premise of Call Me Evie is a great one – but I feel like Pomare had the idea and then went in search of a plot that he had to backwards engineer to fit, with characters drawn purely in service of the ‘reveal’. That said, I think it would adapt well for the screen; I can definitely see it as an eight-part mini-series for the ABC.
Read Call Me Evie on audiobook via Libro.fm here.
My favourite Amazon reviews of Call Me Evie:
- “Life is too short to read this book.” – sc
- “please this is so “Gone on a Train Girl”…” – Margaret
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