Paul Jaskunas

I gave up tv and mysteries last year.Nevertheless, I'm open to either if something good enough comesalong. Hidden was worth breaking my no-mysteries rule for.Hidden is the story of a woman who is attacked in her home. Shesuffers a serious head trauma, but feels no hesitation when she isasked to identify her assailant; she is certain that it is herhusband. She is taken aback, then, when an imprisoned man, due to bereleased shortly on parole, steps forward and confesses to the crime.The story is an intriguing one about truth and reality andperception; I'm glad I read it.… (mere)

Crimes of violence, especially ones involving domestic abuse, are complicated things. A lot of folks see them as black and white, formulating a simple formula in their heads: man hits woman, man gets arrested, man goes to jail, woman leaves man. It’s hard to imagine the vast landscape of gray such a calculation misses; it doesn’t account for conflicted feelings of love, fear, and dependence; it doesn’t account for a broken, overloaded system of justice ill equipped to address deeply rooted interpersonal and personal problems; and it doesn’t account for the independent human will, both innocent and malevolent.

Jaskunas travels some of these gray expanses with his novel [Hidden]. Maggie Wilson awoke from a coma seven years ago to an altered reality, suffering from a severe head injury, the onset of epileptic convulsions, and amnesia about who attacked her. Slowly she sketched out the events of her attack, remembering her husband, Nate, was the attacker. She testified against him and sent him to prison. Now, another convict, about to be released from prison, has confessed to the crime, leaving Maggie to doubt her fragile memory and her delicate connection to a world of which she is mostly frightened.

Jaskunas mostly succeeds in mapping out the confused and contradictory inner world of a victim, no easy task given that he was writing against his own gender. The remainder of the story, though, is somewhat stale, well traveled ground. The book accurately and vividly outlines the manipulative and machiavelian nature of an abusive husband but does little to color outside those lines. Jaskunas boldly takes on some of the grayer areas of such a crime, and the underlying relationship, and accurately paints portrays a paranoid, frightened, and hopeless victim. The rest of story never delivers on that promise. With more time and additional pages, Jaskunas could have added the same complexity he brought to Maggie’s private battles to the rest of the characters and story.

3 bones… (mere)