What do readers think of Hieroglyphics by Jill McCorkle? Write your own review.

Hieroglyphics is a multi-layered novel full of empathy and powered by a desire to understand what happens when parental ties are damaged prematurely. It is an exploration of how we make sense of our lives when there has been a major disruption in them and the role forgiveness plays in finding peace. Although it has an unusual structure—four characters take turn telling their own story in their own way—the strands come together in a satisfying way. It is a slow-moving book, but patience with it pays off.

This story is told through the voices for 4 characters from three different generations who are connected together through the place which they live. The chapters go back and forth throughout time from the 1940s through the early 2000s as the author slowly develops their life histories and how they connect with each other using real life events, place names, and products. Book clubs would enjoy unraveling the characters and discussing how memories can evolve over time.

After a certain age, you begin to realize that life isn't a neat and linear progression of memories, but rather a series of disjointed artifacts, rituals, and language that make that life take shape. Digging a little deeper, you understand something else: that often, the story of your life is easier to fall into than your own life.

This is a mature work by a profound author, and more than once I stopped and wondered if I would have appreciated it if I were, say, 20 or 30 or even 40 years of age. The honest answer is, I'm not sure. But at this point, it resonated strongly.

The novel is a finely wrought deconstruction of lives that are lived partially in shadow with occasional artifacts that shine light on each person's carefully protected psyche. Jill McCorkle mines the hieroglyphics that define us and maybe, just maybe, offer a chance of redemption.

This book has four characters who are bound together by circumstances or blood relationships. The author introduces one at a time and the reader finds herself engrossed in the story only to turn the page and another character is being introduced. There is the couple Lil and Frank who have been married many years. As the author jumps from one character to another there is also a time change. Sometimes you're with Lil in 1967,1985 or 2015. We follow Lil and Frank from before their marriage until they are in their 80s.
Turn a page and we are in Shelly's chaotic world where she is trying to balance being a single mother to six year old Harvey and her job as a court reporter. Shelly bears the scars of an abusive childhood which translates to difficulty dealing with her sons and long term relationships with men. She happens to be renting Frank's childhood home and she and Harvey are connected to Frank when he tries to visit that home before he dies.
Harvey's world is one of a vivid imagination colored by horror stories told to him by his older brother.
While I enjoyed the characters, the vivid descriptions and insight the author used, I found the disjointed threads of going from one character to another as well as a new time period made reading this book frustrating and difficult to follow. The author used another technique that was also confusing. She would state a fact, like Shelly had 2 sons long before the second son was introduced. It led me to think I had missed something earlier. I found that when I got about 3/4 through this book, I began to read just one thread at a time following Lil then Frank then Shelly and Harvey smoothly to the end of the book. It was at that time I found the characters more likeable and the book more enjoyable.

Beautifully written, Jill McCorkle weaves the stories of four characters and their family histories. Lil and Frank, an elderly married couple who had both lost a parent tragically when they were very young and a commonality that drew them together, were the most interesting for me but Shelley and her young son, Harvey, grew on me as the story went along. Shelley's older son, Jason, came into the story too late, in my opinion. Sometimes I felt there was too much repetition of the characters' stories but the incredibly fine writing made it easy to overlook. A thoughtful look at how we never fully understand the parents who raise us. This would be a great book for discussion.

I would recommend this delightful book to all who like both mysteries and complicated family dynamics. Jill does a great job looking at how we relive our lives at the end and how much out parent child early relationships shape who we become. I loved her characters and really cared about them by the middle of the story. Thank you for a great Summer read!

"Palimpsest" might be a better title for this novel which alternates between four characters retrieving their memories at different points in time: some are recent, some buried, some "reread" in light of new experiences. Two of the characters, Frank and Lil, are a longtime married couple from Boston who have recently moved to the small town in North Carolina where Frank spent part of his childhood. A retired professor of archaeology, Frank wants to retrieve relics and dig up memories of that time, which followed the death of his father in a horrific train accident. Lil meanwhile is wading through boxes of keepsakes and journals she has kept throughout her life, sorting them to pass on to their children, as at intervals she revisits her own childhood loss, the death of her mother in the Coconut Grove nightclub fire. Their early experience of tragedy brought Frank and Lil together in their youth, but now the lingering impacts of those memories in different ways shadow an otherwise happy marriage. Shelley is a young single mother remembering her troubled childhood and failed relationships, while trying to cope with an imaginative and challenging son, Harvey. The two live in Frank's childhood home. At the close, we find out how these two families are connected, in a way that suggests how we all misread the "hieroglyphics" of each other's lives, even those closest to us.

Much as I admire the author's craft in capturing the flow of consciousness in distinctively different characters, moving between present and different layers of the past, I found it a hard story to sink into; with conflicts largely buried, and so many shifts back and forth in time and between characters, I missed a unifying narrative thread to propel the action. There's much insight and feeling here, but the drama is all offstage.

The past should usefully inform the present but all memory, more often reimagined memory, should be handled as if fragile. The novel is all about the fragility and foibles of human connection and disconnection. McCorkle shows delicate sensibilities with her subject matter.

She reveals how trauma can shred trust, with far-reaching consequence. The author deftly employs a variety of forms showing our (often strangled) attempts to better understand ourselves and others, to better trust and be trusted, to be better loved and appreciated.

A myriad of collected objects, recalled events, and reimagined memories evoke sensory overload, at first, but together they become useful triggers to stir up the sediments in the reader's own past.

I liked the flux of unresolved tensions stretched among good and bad memories, as nuanced in each of the principals. I also liked the author's treatment of personal bonds and relationships developed, broken, then repaired and remolded when they were better understood.

The metaphor of home, where life is secure and firm, is invoked in a number of ways. All roads lead home, as voiced by one of the mothers, might not be a truism … but it is appropriate to consider: what if "going back home" is a real and realistic human desire. What if we understand ourselves better when we are authentically connected through the trust of loving home and family.