Book review: Nothing Can Hurt You by Nicola Maye Goldberg

Nothing Can Hurt You, by Nicola Maye Goldberg

Nothing Can Hurt You
by Nicola Maye Goldberg
(Raven Books, $33)
Reviewed by Hannah Tunnicliffe

A book with a murder usually falls into one of two categories – a whodunnit or a whydunnit – but Nothing Can Hurt You by Nicola Maye Goldberg creates a category all of its own.

The book begins with Marianne, who has recently moved to upstate New York for "fresh air and open space" but mostly to escape her own psychotic episodes and, by the end of this first chapter, we have the dead body around which the rest of the book centrifuges.

The fictional murder of Sara Morgan in the woods surrounding her liberal arts college is purportedly based on a true crime but Goldberg doesn't dwell on blood and gore, turning instead to the divisions, fractures and repercussions a murder leaves among and within the lives of those left behind.

Eleven more characters take the reins of Nothing Can Hurt You, each leading a chapter and revealing an aspect of Sara's life and death. Most of the characters are women who bear the emotional shrapnel of Sara's brutal death, including her tormented half-sister, a girl Sara used to babysit, her best friend, a junior reporter who covered the case in the local paper, the murderer's sister and Sara's mother - who has become a psychic, assisting police with particularly confusing and nasty cases.

In many ways, Nothing Can Hurt You is more like a collection of intriguing, interconnected short stories, rather than the type of novel most of us are used to with a beginning, middle and end and a clear arc of rising and falling tension. Instead, Goldberg has presented us with a view down a kaleidoscope, leaving us to piece together what might have happened and deciding how we feel about it.

It's a fresh approach, told with a modern, sly and darkly funny voice. In one scene a seasoned reporter laments with her more junior colleague that it's a shame the murderer she is covering isn't more deranged, noting: "It's too bad he never ate anyone's hands, or anything … That could have made your career."

Initially, Nothing Can Hurt You felt like the cool girl at a party – dressed entirely in black, producing more questions than answers, pinning me down with an unwavering gaze before glancing away, suddenly bored. I have no doubt Goldberg's structure and choice to leave the reader wondering will annoy some and delight others but by the end of Nothing Can Hurt You I remained happily on the hook.

This is a unique and intriguing book that could almost be read from any point, and I'll likely be reading it more than once.