WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST

A debut novel set in Nashquitten, Massachusetts, a fictional seaside town.

A teenager named Lucy Anderson dies under mysterious circumstances at a party after a video clip of her having a seizure circulates on social media. Grabowski’s novel traces a constellation of relationships, some intimate and others incidental, between Lucy and 10 girls and women who narrate the stories of their lives. Jane, who attends the local public high school with Lucy, is having an affair with her math teacher and caring for her mother, who suffers from a mysterious chronic illness. Natalie has managed to escape her hometown but ends up working for the tyrannical founder of a San Francisco startup, a decision she begins to regret when she returns home to care for her sick mother. Mona, Natalie’s best friend and old rival who told her to take the job, crosses paths with two of the girls who witnessed Lucy’s accident. Though Mona knows one of them and can tell they’re both in trouble, she chooses to do nothing. “[This] is the danger of girls,” Mona thinks. “They look like deer when, really, they’re wolves.” This comment could just as easily describe Mona and many of the novel’s female protagonists. Women suffer at the hands of men—besides the lascivious math teacher, there’s also a coach who’s sexually assaulting students—but they also betray each other. That’s the case with Maureen, president of the high school PTA. She’s a do-gooder who is trying to organize a memorial for Lucy, but she also has made a huge moral compromise to protect her daughter, who did something cruel. Each of the book’s first-person sections takes its time, fully immersing us in the dreams of its narrator and how those dreams have been frustrated. Girls and women inflict damage on each other by being too close and not recognizing their own agency and power, and also because disrupting systems of male privilege is difficult. Grabowski’s exploration of all these ideas makes for a brilliant novel.

A smart, propulsive novel attentive to the ways community can fall short.