Alina Grabowski’s Kaleidoscope premiere is about to begin Women and children firstJane Ryder, 16, rides her bicycle through the rain-soaked streets of Nashquitten, a fictional town on the Massachusetts coast south of Boston. It’s a Saturday morning in May, and the air smells of “seaweed and crab shells”—Jane’s street is flooded because of a breached seawall that the town won’t repair “because it’s on the beach side. Where people actually live, not where people ‘summer’.
As Jane cycled past “Murder Junction” onto the town’s single highway, where a cluster of white flags commemorated teenagers killed in crashes, she thought of the children she’d seen taking selfies there, “Writing About Childhood and angels’ long text illustrates the fragility of life… holding each other tight… as they wonder what it would be like if they died, if they would be called funny, friendly, smart, handsome, or sexy. Jane knew, In a small town like Nashquitten, where six high school students have died in the past five years, opioids are easy to deal with, people often disappear, and no one is long remembered.
What Jane doesn’t know is that her classmate Lucy Anderson has mysteriously died at a house party the night before as rain blows into the town, a tragedy that will upend her community and prove its interconnectedness.
The mystery of Lucy’s death drives Women and children first, but Grabowski’s novel is not a thriller or a detective story. The novel is divided into ten chapters, divided into two parts before and after Lucy’s death. Each chapter is narrated in the first person by a different Nashquaton girl or woman who has some connection to the tragedy. From classmate Jane to college tutor Layla, to best friend Sophia, to mother Bryn. The narrators form a Greek chorus to tell the story of this broken, grieving community, their perspectives gradually providing fragments of how Lucy died and who she was. Through the impeccable conjuring of this generation of female actors, Grabowski explores the fickleness of truth, the fallibility of memory, how difficult it is to truly meet the people closest to you, and how easy it is to betray one another.
Grabowski’s choice setting Women and children first In the fictional Nashquitan, he is a wise man. The lives of everyone in this tight-knit community overlap, creating the perfect conditions for a novel that relies on intertwined perspectives. Grabowski clearly drew from his own upbringing in Scituate, Massachusetts. exhausted. This is a fishing town with a strong Catholic atmosphere, dominated by a declining middle class. Those who remained were trapped there because of thwarted ambitions.
Through the narrator’s stories and fragments of memory, we learn that Lucy has dreams of escaping. Those who knew Lucy knew her as an artist who used water from tidal pools to paint on huge canvases and turned her bedroom wall into a mural with “swirls of ocean color”. Through Layla, we learn that Lucy has ambitions to go to school in New York; later, Sofia tells us that Lucy imagines the city as a place where “you can be whatever you want to be,” unlike Nash Quinten, “Everything you do becomes a stain that sticks to you forever.” Lucy’s blemish was her epilepsy—earlier that year, she had a seizure on the floor of a school bus, a video of which was filmed by one of her classmates and soundtracked by “an electronic dance song, Its beat matched the tremors of her body.”
The night Lucy died, she was at a party with the classmate she believed made the video and was talking about him with two other girls before she fell to her death from the unfinished deck. Did she have another seizure? Was she pushed? Was this an accident? Was it suicide?
as Women and children first As the story unfolds, Grabowski gradually brings the reader closer to Lucy, while also planting the seeds for what will eventually come to light as to the truth of what happened to her. Her narrators’ stories are sometimes contradictory, revealing how their perspectives and memories are clouded by their own biases and experiences. As I read, I kept turning back to earlier chapters to re-understand each girl or woman’s story, highlighting moments of insight that Grabowski excels at, such as, “We are always on someone else’s path, But it can be disorienting to reconcile that proximity with the incomprehensibility of a stranger’s choices,” or, “When someone disappears without explanation, your ability to determine what happened to them .
Ultimately, the novel becomes less about Lucy’s mystery and more about how our actions influence each other, even when—and especially when—we believe we lack agency. The women and girls of Nashquitten tend to be self-protective, even selfish. Older women, in particular, realize how difficult it is to hold men accountable and instead try to protect their daughters, even if it means hurting others. PTA president Maureen sought forgiveness in her plea because she could not forgive herself for her choices and believed her daughter’s generation would never understand “We were never girls, not really. There was a time when we were children, yes.” But a girl child is different, girls are prey.
This is not to say Women and children first presents a bleak picture of human nature. At the novel’s center, a teenager named Marina retells a story Grabowski himself heard growing up, about Rebecca and Abigail Bates’ “American Army of Two” Scituate. “The duration of this story reminded me that the actions of two girls can have a lasting impact on many people,” Grabowski wrote in the acknowledgments. Rebecca and Abigail were the daughters of a lighthouse keeper, who were appointed lighthouse keepers one day during the War of 1812. When they spotted a British warship approaching, they beat the fifes and drums so violently that the soldiers thought an army was waiting for them on the shore. When Marina’s mother first told her the story, the girl called it false. “What if I’m lying? How does that change the story?” her mother quipped. Women and children first It reminds us that not only do our actions and choices affect change, but so do our stories.
Christine Martin is writing a book about American orphans for Bold Type Books.Her work also appears in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, The Beguiled, and elsewhere.She tweeted at @kwistent.
