MY SWEET GIRL
Jayatissa, Amanda Berkley (384 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 14, 2021 978-0-593-33508-6 A Bay Area woman is plagued by memories of a Sri Lankan orphanage in this psychological thriller. Paloma Evans, “the luckiest girl in the whole wide world”—or at least at the Little Miracles Girls’ Home—is adopted by do-gooding philanthropists Mr. and Mrs. Evans when she’s 12. That momentous event takes her away from the more dire elements of orphanage life—especially out of the clutches of the nasty Sister Cynthia—but it also means leaving her best friend, Lihini. Eighteen years later, living in San Francisco, Paloma is struggling: She drinks too much, feels abandoned by her adoptive parents, makes money from a slightly sordid source, and is convinced she’s being haunted by the same ghost that her fellow residents believed haunted the orphanage. Then she comes home to find her roommate dead—murdered, in fact. Soon, along with interactions with her therapist, Nina, she’s juggling the police, nosy neighbors, a potential stalker, and a friendly fellow Sri Lankan named Saman. Woven through with incisive references to Wuthering Heights, Little Women, Oliver Twist, Enid Blyton, The Sound of Music, and, above all, the lyrics to “Que Sera Sera,” the novel often has a dreamlike quality (read: nightmarish) that heightens its sometimes-erratic quality of psychological suspense. The back-and-forth narrative between Paloma’s childhood at the orphanage and her fraught, haunted adulthood in San Francisco nearly two decades later is a page-turner, albeit one in which some surprises mesh better than others. An uneven debut that nevertheless offers twists a-plenty.
asthma but lacks medicine. In depicting Da’Naisha’s attempts to organize her fellow refugees to fend off an impending attack from marauding racists, Johnson crafts a fine-grained character study that also harrowingly reveals how racist violence repeats. Not all of the remaining stories have the same force, but Johnson has a knack for irony and inventive conceits. “Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse” is a story in the form of a checklist, suggesting all the ways that pursuing a sense of security can be products of self-delusion (“Never mind the darkskinned guard who wouldn’t even let you in…”). And the opening “Control Negro” is narrated by a man who uses his son to study whether a Black man who’s “otherwise equivalent to those broods of average American Caucasian males” could transcend racism. In a few taut pages, Johnson uses the setup to explore not just institutional racism, but fatherhood, fatalism, policing, and social engineering. “How does anyone know if they are getting more or less than they deserve?” the narrator asks, a question the story makes both slippery and plain as day. A sharp debut by a writer with wit and confidence.
MY MONTICELLO
Johnson, Jocelyn Nicole Henry Holt (224 pp.) $22.99 | Oct. 5, 2021 978-1-250-80715-1
Stories centered on racism and Virginia, anchored by a dystopian tale set in Thomas Jefferson’s home. The title novella that closes Johnson’s debut book is stellar and could easily stand on its own. Plainly inspired by the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Johnson imagines a near future in which an “unraveling” has forced some of the town’s brown and Black residents to find safety on Jefferson’s homestead. The narrator, a University of Virginia student named Da’Naisha, is a descendant of Jefferson and Sally Hemings and used to have an internship on the Monticello grounds. She’s well aware of the irony of taking cover on a former plantation, but she has more pressing issues: She’s pregnant, uncertain of the father, and her grandmother is suffering from |
kirkus.com
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fiction
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1 august 2021
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21
