The Motion of Puppets

June 20, 2016
In his latest, Donohue (The Boy Who Drew Monsters) adeptly blends reality and fantasy. While temporarily living in Quebec with her husband, Theo, circus performer Kay Harpe longs for the wooden marionette she sees in the window of an abandoned toy shop, the Quatre Mains. Fleeing a lecherous coworker’s advances one evening, Kay seeks refuge in the curiously unlocked shop and subsequently disappears. Left to conduct a desperate search for Kay on his own, Theo, a writer, must unravel the mystery with few leads to guide him. At the urging of his comrade Egon Picard, Theo’s circus stage manager friend, Theo probes the vacant Quatre Mains for clues to Kay’s disappearance, with unexpected results. As Kay falls in with a cast of oddball characters and learns to accept a life governed by perplexing fantasy world logic, Theo struggles to navigate a series of unusual situations that conspire to derail his search. Told from both Kay’s and Theo’s viewpoint, this narrative blurs the lines between the real and imaginary worlds. An inventive and suspenseful story told from an original perspective, Donahue’s novel examines how refusing to embrace the present and struggling to escape unavoidable circumstances can alter one’s life forever.