LITTLE MISERIES

A young girl growing up in 1960s Iowa learns that grown-ups are rarely what they seem.

The Castle family name once meant greatness—or, rather, a particular sort of Midwest greatness, when their seeds were sold all over Iowa and their name adorned signs and silos everywhere they looked. But the Castle family of the 1960s, as seen through the eyes of the middle child, narrator Kimmy, no longer lives in the big house on the hill that they still drive by every Christmas Eve. Instead, Mr. Castle is a church deacon and a mortgage broker with a scotch- and cigarette-loving wife and three children: plump, bookish Kimmy, older brother Paul, and little Nellie. While the book is labeled a novel, it reads much more like a collection of linked stories or personal essays, its string of vignettes taking place mostly during Kimmy’s tween years. They recount Kimmy’s eyes first opening to the rules and constrictions that govern the lives of the adults around her, from the gym teacher who unleashes his cruelty upon two of Kimmy’s classmates to Kimmy’s cadre of grandparents and extended family in Des Moines. Though many of these figures appear in lower-stakes anecdotes (such as the disappointment Kimmy experiences when family friends skip out on a shared holiday tradition to stay at home with their new color TV), the book’s main throughline shows how catastrophic the secret world of grown-ups can truly be on the delicate web that is a family. Fakih’s book, her first for adults, will appeal to anyone who looks back on their own childhood with a mixture of nostalgia and horror.

Despite the book's unwieldy structure, it shows Fakih as a gifted chronicler of children's helplessness and familial angst.