Tag: After You’d Gone

After You’d Gone begins at the end: our protagonist Alice sees something nasty in the woodshed (as it were; it’s not really a woodshed) and shortly thereafter gets hit by a car (possibly on purpose) and lapses into a coma.  The rest of the book goes circling and swooping around what happened and why and what it meant to Alice, exploring her past and her mother’s and her grandmother’s, shifting points of view and tenses every few pages.  I know I complained recently about rapidly-shifting narrative focus.  It’s disorienting here too, and there’s no reason to be changing tenses every…