I have been reading The Scopas Factor by Vincent Panettiere, and I found myself wondering why I was having such difficulty moving through the book. It wasn't that the story wasn't interesting. There is mystery, art, forgery, murder, kidnapping, and a number of pieces that eventually begin to connect. Detective Mike Hegan is pulled into a complicated case that reaches far beyond the small California town.
But I think I finally figured out what was holding me back.
I didn't want to leave the beginning.
The story opens in a refugee camp in Thailand in 1990, where a woman known as the Mud Woman spends her days drawing pictures in the dirt. She has endured so much, yet there is something almost peaceful about watching her create. She draws, the rain washes the picture away, and she draws it again. She is trying to remember. She is holding onto something that could so easily be lost.
Then her daughter, Mos, finds her.
That relationship stopped me.
There was something about the Mud Woman creating those images for her daughter that felt incredibly free to me. She could take what lived inside her—the memories, the places, the people—and put them into the earth. For a little while, she wasn't simply a woman who had lost so much. She was a mother creating something her daughter could see and understand.
And perhaps that is why I had trouble leaving those pages behind.
I wanted to stay there a little longer.
There was a simplicity in those early scenes that spoke to me. A woman, a child, the dirt beneath them, and a story that needed to be remembered. Before the mystery became larger and the story began moving between characters and places, I felt connected to something much more personal.
The Mud Woman's drawings eventually become something more permanent when she creates a Hmong story cloth, preserving the memories of what happened to her people.
The author has explained that his interest in Hmong story cloths helped inspire the character and the novel.
I think that idea of creating something so that it will not be forgotten stayed with me.
Perhaps that is also why the rest of the book felt harder for me to settle into. The story moves away from that quiet mother-and-daughter relationship and into a much more complicated mystery involving art, antiquities, forgery, crime, and Mike Hegan's investigation.
I kept wanting to return to the Mud Woman.
Not necessarily because I wanted the mystery to stop, but because I wanted more of that feeling I had in the beginning.
It made me think about how we sometimes become attached to a particular place or character in a book before we even realize it. We may think we are reading for the mystery or the destination, but sometimes it is just one small moment that holds us—the way someone looks at another person, or simply someone creating something beautiful out of circumstances that are anything but beautiful.
For me, The Scopas Factor became as much about that feeling as it was about solving the mystery.
I understand why I have been reading it differently than I expected. I wasn't having difficulty with the story. I was having difficulty leaving the place where the story first touched me.
I received a copy of this book from Vincent Panettiere.
Learn more about author Vincent Panettiere here.
