“A dark, powerful novel traces the trajectory of a murder victim’s life.” a tiny upward shove
A TINY UPWARD SHOVE
Chadburn, Melissa Farrar, Straus and Giroux (352 pp.) $27.00 | April 12, 2022 978-0-3742-7775-8
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kirkus.com
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fiction
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1 march 2022
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y o u n g a d u lt
A moving but disturbing novel tells the story of a young woman’s descent into addiction and sexual violence. This impressive debut novel opens with a gruesome murder, then moves back in time to recount how the lives of a “throwaway” young woman and a serial killer intersected. Chadburn builds her story around a real case, that of Vancouver pig farmer Willie Pickton, who confessed to having killed 49 women, many of them Indigenous and/or sex workers, over two decades before his arrest in 2002. The novel’s fictional main character is Marina Salles, who, at age 18 becomes both Pickton’s last victim and his avenger thanks to an aswang, a supernatural creature from the folklore of the Philippines (who’s also an occasional narrator). Marina’s
grandmother is Filipina, and she provides a warm household in central California during the girl’s childhood in the 1980s. But when Mutya, Marina’s restless, self-centered mother, moves to Los Angeles with a boyfriend, Marina in tow, their lives begin to unravel. The boyfriend bails, and Mutya’s addictions lead her to sex work; one night when Marina is 13, she brings the girl with her to a party, with disastrous results. Marina finds herself in foster care, cut off from both mother and grandmother and trying to figure out the harsh rules of her new environment. The foster facility she’s in turns out to be a training ground for drug use and sex work. While there, she falls in love with Alex, another girl, but their relationship is a short moment of sweetness in Marina’s journey to her fate. Chadburn’s prose is sometimes lovely, always compelling, and she handles multiple storylines skillfully. Marina is engaging and heartbreaking, and other characters are vividly portrayed as well—including Pickton. The novel is a relentless revelation of the everyday exploitation of girls and women, but readers should be aware that it describes rape and other forms of violence in horrific detail, over and over. A dark, powerful novel traces the trajectory of a murder victim’s life.
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