Novels No. 88

 

Alina Grabowski. Women and Children First. USA: SJP Lit/Zando, 2024.

One small seaside town. Turn by turn, various residents offer a slice of their lives. They will overlap in revealing a very originally-conceived mystery revolving around the death of high school student Lucy, how others interacted with her. To give an inkling of how it unfolds, I’ll try to whittle down the connecting personalities to a nub but it’s difficult. The residents concerned:

Student Jane is secretly having sex with Rob, the new young maths teacher; Jane’s part-time job co-worker Eric says his cousin Lucy is subject to occasional epileptic seizures. Natalie is visiting from the west coast to see her hospitalized mother; she sees a distraught man called Charlie asking the nurses for Lucy. Layla is the school counsellor to whom Sophie confided that the Coach is a sexual predator. Layla lives with Mona where they hear students partying at a construction site in the woods. Mona is Natalie’s former roommate, hoping for grad school acceptance; Mona and Layla distantly glimpse Marina and Olivia coming from the party in bloody clothing. At the party, student Marina encourages Lucy to revenge herself on a boy who had taken ‒ and posted ‒ a stealthy, naked video of her; only Marina comforts Lucy who suffers a disastrous fall and all the under-age drinkers disappear.

Student Olivia is Principal Cushing’s neglected daughter in favour of sister Lila; at the party she dares Lucy to push the offending boy off a dangerous building. Rae is an aspiring actress working at O’Dooley’s pub where Charlie—Rae’s godfather and Lucy’s father—is a regular; Charlie married Brynn but they’re separated. Maureen is the PTA president whose daughter Emma has made fun of Lucy; Maureen and Layla have issues with the school whitewashing the investigations of Lucy’s death and teacher Rob’s inappropriate conduct; Brynn shows up at the meeting. Student Sophie was Lucy’s BFF; she and Jane become close after the funeral, resolving some relationships in their lives. Brynn is Lucy’s mom, convinced her death was an accident unlike swirling rumours; she comes to terms with the artistic expression of her daughter.

Teenage daughters and mothers! In many cases, absent mothers. Each person here gets full character insights. Do we even know how much parental or sibling drama plays out daily at school, on social media, at home?! Grabowski’s presentation is brilliant, almost dizzying.

Bits

▪ Men love it when you make fun of other men. They think it “keeps them honest,” which is apparently something they can’t do themselves. (6)

▪ The hospital, like all hospitals, seems to have been designed by a coked-out architecture student determined to trap all visitors within its sanitized walls. (49)

▪ I wonder if there’s a correlation between being skinny and uptight. Maybe all that internal clenching makes your metabolism speed up. (130)

▪ “Should you be drinking that?” I ask. “With your medication?” (149)

▪ “Drink, drink, drink!” she shouts while Lucy chugs, and I think about how much more useful she’d be if she ever knew when to shut the fuck up. (149-50)

▪ He just turns on Bruce Springsteen and hums along like maybe we can all pretend that the mirror isn’t busted and Mom isn’t pissed and Coach didn’t touch me and a girl didn’t die and Lila was always, only, one of us. (175-6)

▪ “It’s what you do to everyone else. I have to make Mom and Dad happy to make up for you. And I have to make you happy to make up for Mom and Dad.” (179)

▪ But lately I’ve been thinking it’s not particularly healthy to spend multiple nights a week with my dead best friend’s mom, especially since Lucy’s death has turned Brynn into a kid. (251)

Hannah Deitch. Killer Potential. TPL download. USA: William Morrow, 2025.

Talk about a racing start! Evie Gordon is a tutor paid by wealthy families to prepare their teenagers for the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) required for acceptance at American colleges. One day she arrives as usual at Serena Victor’s LA-area home to find both the parents shockingly murdered. Not only that, she finds an emaciated unknown woman tied up in a closet—whom she releases just as Serena appears in hysterics and her boyfriend Lukas arrives. In the confusion and fright, everyone pushing and fighting, Serena falls lifeless to the floor and Lukas is calling the police. Evie senses that she will be blamed for three deaths, grabs the other woman, and hightails it away in her car. Heading east, the strange woman can’t or won’t speak, but she assists in the getaway; they’ve become fugitives wanted for the murders of Peter and Dinah Victor. Evie has a dazed, formless thought of reaching her North Carolina hometown.

This is a journey, in more ways than one. The women are suspicious of each other; they have to buy gas and food without being recognized. Evie works out that her companion had been a kidnapped sex slave for the strange Peter Victor. Slowly they warm up to each other, avidly following the news, hoping police will catch the real killer. Jae finally speaks. To their surprise they hear Serena is recovering; but she may think Evie was the perpetrator. Certainly the media paints them as stone cold killers, and their brutal wayside encounters do nothing to dispel that impression. Jae and Evie begin acknowledging their attraction to each other as they also acquire the scary demeanour attributed to them in the widespread publicity. Evie’s unbridled imagination continually builds fantasies of an alternate life but crossing into Canada is their last hideout together. Events go spinning sideways; hard truths and twists are coming.

A road trip where the tension never lets up, and a psycho-drama of the first order: breathless seems like a good description of an amazing writer’s first novel!

Scraps

▪ I circled her. I felt like someone starving who’d finally stumbled upon some meat. She was roadkill. (62)

▪ Whenever anyone picked a fight with me, I could never resist the bait. I was a stranger to the high road. (78)

▪ We were two brutes, scaly and unyielding, together, and alone. (78)

▪ I’d spent the entire day driving. Nonstop, eagle-eyed surveillance. I couldn’t imagine stepping back into the car, back into the night, a world of cops and US Marshalls, FBI agents and hotel clerks. (120)

▪ It wasn’t me. I didn’t do anything. Why is this happening to me? (151)

▪ A funny thing, how the language of courtship mirrors the language of hunting. Chase. Pursue. Stalk. We had become the object of it all. Objects of lust, objects of fear. (170)

▪ “I just couldn’t stop thinking it was a person. There was a person, living in our walls. Taking food in the middle of the night. Watching me sleep.” (219)

▪ “You had to have known there was another story unspooling, unseen, alongside your own.” (225)