Jeatherhane Reads

What would you do if your husband cheated? Would you stay together? Would you seek revenge? Maybe you would do both. The writing style is distinct and fanciful—it took me a while to get into its rhythm, but it works well for this story that is mostly stream of consciousness told from Lucy’s point of view. Lucy is a very flawed but relatable character. I was on team Lucy from the first page.   Lucy finds out her husband has cheated, and it makes her question her own present, past and future. At times she even steps out of herself and the point of view switches to third person, narrated sometimes by the harpy that Lucy has obsessed about her whole life. “ I asked my mother what a harpy was, and she told me: they punish men for the things they do .”   This is another novel that doesn’t have quotation marks, which seems to be very popular right now. In this case, it adds to the surreal quality of many scenes—we are totally in Lucy’s mind, and we are not sure if it is completely sound

Mickey Fitzgerald is an officer on the streets in Kensington, Pennsylvania, where an opioid crisis is killing hundreds of people a year. The situation is hopeless, but Mickey can’t give up hope because her sister is one of the addicts. It is heartbreaking to read the “Then” sections of this novel, which chronicle the sad and neglectful childhood that Michaela and Kacey had growing up after their mother died of a drug overdose. They live with a callous and cruel grandmother. Mickey is smart, shy and serious, and doesn’t fit in socially. Her younger sister defends her, but as Kacey falls in with the wrong crowd, the sisters drift apart and Mickey finds a mentor in a policeman she meets at a youth program.   The “Now” sections of this book are terrifying—a serial killer is targeting prostitutes and Mickey is afraid that one of the victims will be her sister, who has been missing for weeks.   “I wonder, as always, whether I’ll know the woman: whether she’ll be someone I recognize fro