EDDIE HEST VS. SUBURBIA

In Castoro’s madcap novel, a single mother leaves the city for the suburbs and finds herself the target of the community’s chief bully and blackmailer.

Eddie Hest loves living in Detroit and doesn’t want to move, but her landlord has sold the building where she resides. Divorced from her young daughter’s drug-addicted father, Eddie has only 30 days to find a new place for herself and Grace. Eddie has always been a bit of a nonconformist (think purple hair and a variety of tattoos) with a strong streak of independence, but she’s fiercely committed to being a “good mom” to Grace, and that requires setting up a stable home. After borrowing the down payment from her mother, she purchases a small house in Shady Hollow, a Detroit suburb. Once Grace enrolls in fourth grade in her new school and joins the soccer team, Eddie learns how strange her new hometown is. When she picks Grace up from practice, Eddie sees that no adults are there to supervise the children. She emails the coach to ask why the children were left alone. Days later, Eddie is accosted, berated, and threatened by a “Psycho Soccer Mom” who turns out to be the coach’s wife; Eddie is now in the crosshairs of the tyrant of Shady Hollow. (“Never! Ever! Question what he does. Or you’ll have to answer to me!”) Castoro’s imaginatively constructed novel is narrated by Eddie, who records psychiatric “sessions” in an empty room in which she listens only to her own voice; through these recordings, readers follow her string of suburban misadventures as she’s pulled into the bizarre machinations of Psycho Soccer Mom. The narrative is bolstered by an eclectic assembly of secondary characters, and Eddie is an energetic, edgy protagonist. Breezy, conversational, and often biting prose propels the action in an unconventional storyline that manages to be simultaneously absurd and tender, all the while offering a lesson in the power of self-affirmation.

An entertaining beach read, a bit wacky but with plenty of heart.