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A Novel
by Alina Grabowski
Book Reviewed by:A gripping literary puzzle that unwinds the private lives of ten women as they confront tragedy in a small Massachusetts town.
Nashquitten, MA, is a decaying coastal enclave that not even tourist season can revive, full of locals who have run the town's industries for generations. When a young woman dies at a house party, the circumstances around her death suspiciously unclear, the tight-knit community is shaken. As a mother grieves her daughter, a teacher her student, a best friend her confidante, the events around the tragedy become a lightning rod: blame is cast, secrets are buried deeper. Some are left to pick up the pieces, while others turn their backs, and all the while, a truth about that dreadful night begins to emerge.
Told through the eyes of ten local women, Grabowski's Women and Children First is an exquisite portrait of grief and a powerful reminder of life's interconnectedness. Touching on womanhood, class, and sexuality, ambition, disappointment, and tragedy, this novel is a stunning rendering of love and loss, and a bracing lesson from a phenomenal new literary talent that no one walks this earth alone.
JANE
On the last Saturday in May, I drown in my sleep. It happens quickly. I'm standing at the edge of the ocean and when I look down into the water, the wobbly hand of my reflection reaches up to pull me under. Only it's less of a pull and more of an angry yank, like my arm's a dangling ponytail, and suddenly I'm pressed to the sand with my own hand holding me down from above. I want to scream, but my words dissolve into a stream of bubbles. I'm not ready, is what I'm trying to say. But then everything goes black.
I thought you weren't allowed to die in dreams.
When I open my eyes, I see that I've left the window beside my bed open, because sometimes I'm an idiot. The rain's coming in so heavily that when I sit up, my wet sheets stick to my chest like strands of seaweed. If I weren't a scientifically minded person, the dream plus the bedroom shower might seem like a bad omen. But I'm an unsuperstitious atheist, so it doesn't bother me.
The window won't close unless I bang my fist ...
After Lucy Anderson falls to her death at a high school party, no one in Nashquitten, her gloomy, rain-battered hometown on the Massachusetts coast, seems to be quite sure what happened. Across ten chapters narrated by ten different female voices, Women and Children First draws a sharp portrait not so much of the ambitious, mercurial teenager—but of the community that let her slip away. The prose is biting, but although cynicism may be Grabowski's signature style, her writing is thankfully too sharp and too lively to ever wallow in outright despair. Even if Women and Children First lacks variety of voice—too many of its narrators slip into the same sardonic cadence—it's impossible to deny the author's knack for pulling out the short, cutting sentence that captures a very 21st-century malaise. "It felt like the world had ended," one high-schooler says as she contemplates Nashquitten's polluted coastline, "and some stupid person had chosen us as the survivors."..continued
Full Review
(733 words)
(Reviewed by Alex Russell).
Elin Hilderbrand, author of The Five-Star Weekend and The Perfect Couple
Wow wow wow! Alina Grabowski's original and brilliantly written novel, Women and Children First, tells the story of a teenager named Lucy Anderson, who dies at a high school house party, through the lens of ten different women narrators―from her best friend to her principal to her mother. I was dazzled by the author's skill and emotional depth. Emily Nemens, author of The Cactus League
Reading Women and Children First is like encountering the best kind of puzzle: each of its pieces is a small marvel, elegant and finely wrought. But then, the chapters snap together in the most satisfying way, creating a full picture that is as sweeping as it is nuanced. Here are friends and foes, past resentments and future hopes, all the mess and beauty of a complicated, compelling community. You won't be able to put it down until the puzzle is complete Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and The Gin Closet
Alina Grabowski is a writer of startling wisdom and deep humanity, and Women and Children First reads like a shimmering kaleidoscope of grief and longing, a magic lantern casting spectral illumination across dark surfaces of loss. Its pages smell like watermelon body lotion and low tide and fresh snow; they sing with moments of insight that took my breath away. Every voice is so compelling that I never wanted to leave it, but each new voice immediately seduced me―brought me into its own powerful portrait of intimacy and yearning, the cruelties and compassions that compose an adolescence, or a marriage. Together, these voices collectively summon the chorus of a ruptured community, gesturing toward those spiderwebs of attachment and betrayal that unmake us, and those moments of grace that ambush and rearrange us all. Lorrie Moore, author of A Gate at the Stairs
I am a big fan of Women and Children First ... Alina Grabowski is an astute and limber narrative artist and I could read her prose all day long and never grow weary. Sarah Jessica Parker, SJP Lit
A striking debut from a brilliant new voice. Alina Grabowski perfectly inhabits her characters, shining a light on the multidimensionality of both grief and adolescence with great humor and insight.
In Women and Children First, the debut novel from Alina Grabowski, teenager Lucy Anderson has epilepsy, a neurological disorder involving recurring seizures. Lucy has to deal not only with her distress at experiencing the seizures themselves but also with the stigma associated with the condition.
Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders in the world, affecting around 50 million people globally. According to the Epilepsy Foundation, one in 26 people will develop epilepsy at some point in their lives. The condition can start at any age, but it most often begins in childhood or after age 60. In around 50% of cases, there is no identifiable cause; the other 50% can be due to several factors, including genetics, head...
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