Call Me Evie by J.P. Pomare
“Doubting what you see is a very odd experience. And doubting what you remember is also a pretty odd experience, because some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them, and that happens to be the case even for memories that are not true.’”
~ Daniel Kahneman
Call Me Evie (2018) opens with this enigmatic quote from leading psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman is noted for his work on judgement and decision-making. Alongside equally compelling words from Shakespeare, relating to the unreliability of memory, I already felt I was in for something good before I’d even begun to dig into the story.
The first book from New Zealand writer J. P. Pomare, Call Me Evie isn’t the sort of thing I’d normally be drawn to. Too many thrillers leave me disappointed with plot holes and easy-to-guess twists, but a friend suggested this one was worth a go. Getting sucked into Call Me Evie felt like a guilty pleasure, but after a few tentative pages, it had me hooked - I found myself eager to return to it after putting it down.
The book opens with a gripping scene of our main protagonist, seventeen-year-old Kate, hacking her hair off with a pair of nail scissors in a grimy bathroom. An older man, Jim, enters and stops her before shaving her bald with a pair of clippers. A volatile exchange between the two ends with a compliant Kate being led outside to have her photograph taken in her underwear. We know the man is not a stranger - he calls her “darling” - but his behaviour paints a disturbing picture of a manipulative captor over a loving guardian.
We learn that Kate has been kept in a drugged state and removed from her life in Melbourne to a remote town somewhere in New Zealand. Jim attempts to control her every move, giving her a fake name (Evie), locking her in her room, carefully monitoring her eating habits and consistently feeding her an unknown concoction of pills and a bitter powder mixed with juice. Kate/Evie is kept in a state of fear with Jim claiming to be protecting her from “them.” He repeatedly asks her questions about what she remembers of events from a specific night - events responsible for their departure.
Broken down into short, addictive sections labelled “before” and “after,” the pieces of Kate’s situation begin to fall into place in a deliciously slow trickle. This “chunking” of the narrative helped to maintain my attention and kept the pace of the book at a compelling tug.
While on first reading, Call Me Evie might easily be left in its psychological thriller category, but Pomare manages to weave in several important themes. The restlessness of youth, the prevalence of revenge porn, dislocation from place, isolation, domestic violence, and, perhaps unexpectedly, love. He explores the dangers of love and how far we might be prepared to go to shelter the ones we love - or exact revenge on them.
As with all great thrillers, there is a dynamic twist, savoured on the very last page. I have always maintained that books of this genre are best enjoyed by not attempting to guess what that twist might be and giving yourself over to be both surprised and perplexed. For me, that was easy to do with this book as Kate’s narrative is always as much about what she isn’t telling us as what she is.
Pomare’s writing style is one of perfect accessibility which, in the nicest possible way, didn’t demand too much from me. It was easy to immerse myself in the world of Kate and Jim and find a pleasant state of flow in my reading. Pomare’s characters are well-fleshed out without becoming too “high-school-teen-drama.”
We’re living in times of turmoil and uncertainty. I feel compelled to maintain my knowledge of our global situation while also staving off overwhelm and fatigue at just how much information I can consume, process and store in a day. Books like Call Me Evie are small antidotes, not least for the satisfying distraction they provide. Die-hard fans of thrillers will enjoy adding this to their shelves.
And if, like me, you’re simply after a distraction from current life events, Call Me Evie could be the perfect place to hide for a day or so.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in Hobart, Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under @wordswithelaine.
