" The Accidental is a portrait of a family under mostly self-inflicted pressure, a family that drifts and reassembles into something different. A stranger, Amber, and a dreadful family vacation, are the catalysts. Lest we miss that, Ali Smith offers, "Couldn't it sometimes take an outsider to reveal to a family that it was a family?" The premise reminds me of several Clint Eastwood movies: a stranger rides into town. Is he good, or evil? Whichever, he leaves behind a trail of mayhem and reveals the townies to themselves. I like the characters in this, and the ever-present ambiguity. But I could have done without the stream-of-consciousness asides, which became tiresome quickly. I found the novel something of a slog overall. Still, Smith can write: "What was happy? What was an ending? She had been refusing real happiness for years and she had been avoiding real endings for just as long, right up to the moment she had opened the front door on her own emptied house, her own cupboards stripped of their doors, her own unpictured walls and unfilled rooms, no trace of her left, nothing to prove that Eve Smart, whoever she was, had ever been there at all." "
— Marguerite, 1/12/2014