Small Indiscretion (Ellison)

Book Reviews
Delicious, lazy-day reading.... [Jan] Ellison describes her various love triangles in lavish prose...the real strengths of this novel are the foggy, intimate flashbacks that so perfectly capture the sexual and romantic confusion of a young woman in a foreign land (Editor’s Pick).
Leigh Newman - Oprah.com


Ellison is a tantalizing storyteller, dropping delicious hints of foreshadowing and shifting back and forth in time....moving her story forward with cinematic verve.... [She] masterfully captures the confusing and powerful moment when a young woman realizes her effect on men. Compellingly sympathetic characters bring the London chapter of Annie’s story to dramatic life. If you are clinging to a stash of letters and ticket stubs from old lovers, Indiscretion may have you rethinking the cost of holding on to the past rather than basking in the virtues of the present.
USA Today
 

Astonishing.... This voice is alive. It knows something. It will take us somewhere. The magic is accomplished so fast, so subtly, that most readers hardly notice.... A Small Indiscretion is rich with suspense.... Delectable elements of this terrific first novel abound: Its characters are round and real.... Ellison gives us an achingly physical sense of family life.... Lovely writing guides us through, driven by a quiet generosity.... This voice knows something, and by the end of the novel, so do we.
San Francisco Chronicle

 
Rich and detailed.... The plot explodes delightfully, with suspense and a few twists. Using second-person narration and hypnotic prose, Ellison’s debut novel is both juicy and beautifully written. How do I know it’s juicy? A stranger started reading it over my shoulder on the New York City subway, and told me he was sorry that I was turning the pages too quickly.
Flavorwire


Are those wild college days ever really behind you? Happily married Annie finds out.
Cosmopolitan


An impressive fiction debut....both a psychological mystery and a study of the divide between desire and duty.
San Jose Mercury News


A novel to tear through on a plane ride or on the beach.... I was drawn into a web of secrets, a
world of unrequited love and youthful mistakes that feel heightened and more romantic on the cold winter streets of London, Paris, and Ireland.
Bustle


Annie Black is a flawed heroine whose impulses we may distrust, but whose voice is compelling, drawing us in with her ruminating self-awareness and lively observations of those around her.... Ellison renders the California landscape with stunning clarity.... She writes gracefully, with moments of startling insight.... Her first novel is an emotional thriller, skillfully plotted in taut, visual scenes. The stakes are high from the start.... As Ellison pulls the thread that unravels the past, she weaves a rich tapestry of memory and desire, secrets and omissions, and exposes the knotted wages of love.... A Small Indiscretion resolves in an astonishing plot twist that offers both destruction and self-discovery.
Rumpus


The book is a page-turner but the crazy connections are too orchestrated to be believable, and the epistolary format doesn't fit. Would a mother really tell her son all the sordid details of her sexual past, even if it did reveal something about his patrimony?
Publishers Weekly


The author's prose repeatedly catapults readers from the present to the past by employing a second-person point of view that is often difficult to follow....Part romance novel, part coming-of-age story, and part family drama, this somber book about a perpetually flawed woman is a challenging and thought-provoking read. —Samantha Gust, Niagara Univ. Lib., NY
Library Journal


Hard to put down.... O. Henry Prize winner Jan Ellison’s debut novel is a puzzle with the outside pieces finished. Reading it is like compulsively fitting all those revealing middle pieces together. . . . Skillfully weaving two plots, Ellison unveils the details of each, piece by tantalizing piece
BookPage


[A] cleverly constructed debut....crafted, absorbing novel that peels back the layers of Annie’s character as it reveals the secrets of her past and present.
Booklist


Ellison keeps the mystery going by switching among Annie's life in London at age 20, parts of the recent past, and present-time diary-type chapters....that fiendishly answers only one question at a time. Connoisseurs of domestic suspense will finish this book in a few breathless sittings, then wait eagerly for Ellison's next trick.
Kirkus Reviews