I was excited to dive into David James Duncan’s long-awaited novel, “Sun House,” when it came out earlier this month. But I realized pretty quickly that reading this 800-page behemoth was going to require a major investment of time. After all, it took the author three decades to get it ready for publication.

As backup, I picked up another novel. “Community Board” was snack-sized in comparison, and for a few days I alternated my reading time between the two books. By week’s end, I’d only waded into the first 100 pages of “Sun House,” while the other book was read, reflected upon and ready for review. I’ll be covering “Sun House” when I finally get through the book.

But this week, let’s look at “Community Board,” written by Seattle-based author Tara Conklin.

This week’s book

“Community Board,” by Tara Conklin

Mariner — $30 — 368 pp

Conklin’s previous book, “The Last Romantics,” was a New York Times bestseller, so for this new novel, other Northwest-based bestselling authors like Maria Semple and Jonathan Evison were tapped to write advance praise blurbs. But that’s the extent of the Northwest connection. This novel is set squarely in Massachusetts.

The story opens in Back Bay condo in Boston, where 29-year-old Darcy Clipper is informed by her husband that their marriage is over.

Finding all of her married friends too busy to provide a shoulder to cry on, Darcy takes a leave of absence from work and drives to her hometown in western Massachusetts, where she is sure her parents will greet her with open arms, freshly baked muffins and consolation galore. Except they’ve just left to spend the winter in Arizona.

So Darcy processes her grief in isolation, even refusing to answer the door when her folks’ neighbors come by to check in on her.

Instead, she anonymously scrolls through postings on an online message board to see what’s going on locally.

When she’s eaten her way through all of the food in her parents’ pantry and needs to find a way to make some quick cash for food, she finds odd jobs on the community board — first as a finder of lost pets, and then as paid assistant to a wealthy private homeowner who envisions building an adventure playscape not only for his own three sons but for the neighborhood kids, too.

But as neighbors begin to understand just how ambitious this playscape idea is – construction of the project involves scaffolding and cranes – the online community board blows up with opinions about whether or not the project should be allowed to continue.

This novel demonstrates how quickly gossip — online, especially — can become toxic and threaten to derail any attempts at transformative change. Readers are welcome to extrapolate how this dynamic plays out on a larger scale.

With Darcy as the lugubrious, odd-duck heroine, Conklin has fashioned an arch satire around how communities operate in the modern day. Those best-selling authors who wrote the enthusiastic book jacket blurbs found the story to be “hilarious,” “madcap,” and “insightful.” This reviewer found “Community Board” to be baffling.