Women and Children First - Alina Grabowski - ★★

AUTHOR: Alina Grabowski

GENRE: Contemporary Mystery.

PUBLICATION DATE: May 7, 2024.

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A literary mystery surrounding the death of a young girl in a small town. Presented as a series of vignettes from the perspective of ten local women. Great idea, but too disjointed in execution. Might work better if you read it as a small-town drama and like slower-paced narratives with no resolution.

Plot Preview:

In a small town in Massachusetts, a young woman named Lucy dies at a house party. The circumstances surrounding her death are unclear, and as happens in such a situation, there's speculation and gossip and conspiracy about what would have happened.

The story comes to us from ten points of view, each of a local woman who either knows or has heard of Lucy. Through each perspective, we get a glimpse of their own lives as well as their opinion on the tragedy.

In terms of imagination, this debut novel hits the right mark. Major events in a small town somehow end up on everyone's lips, whether people know the victim or not. So the idea of exploring a tragedy through gossip and ruminations is fascinating. The implementation of this concept though is not that smooth.

The ten perspectives in this book come from local women who hear of Lucy's death. Five of these POVs begin from prior to her death, and the remaining five come from after the tragedy. Each perspective doesn't continue from where the earlier one ends. As such, the plot development of the story isn’t progressive.

Every woman narrator is connected to Lucy, but not necessarily in an intimate way. For instance, one connection could just be that she was known to someone the narrator knew. As such, many of the perspectives don't directly talk about Lucy but about their own personal challenges, which are numerous. Their narration isn't necessarily linear, and contains plenty of flashbacks even in between ongoing conversations. All this makes the plot slow in pace and tedious to keep track of.

Moreover, unlike something like ‘Thirteen Reasons Why’, where each fresh narrative begins with and focusses on the dead person, the chapters here are more about the narrator's life, with Lucy making an appearance only when needed. So it takes a long time to keep adjusting to a new story with new (and apparently unrelated) characters when we are still waiting to know what happened to Lucy.

To top it all, each narration is from a woman and in first person. So getting tuned into the new "I" after each chapter takes time, especially as the narrators themselves don't return as narrators in subsequent chapters, but they do pop up as characters in the other first-person perspectives. We never get Lucy's direct perspective.

All this would have still been fine and the book could have been enjoyed as a challenging literary work. However, as the crux of the plot is a murder mystery, what readers love most at the end of such stories is the reveal of the whats and whys and hows of the incident. But do we learn what happened by the end? Nope! The story ends with many unfinished plot threads, including the main one. As such, if you read this book as a mystery, you certainly won't be satisfied. We can take a guess about the guilty party (Actually, this is clear right from the first chapter due to the meagre number of potential suspects) but we don't get any confirmation of the same, nor do we get a clear idea of the sequence of events that led to the tragedy.

The only thing I liked about this book was that it has some excellent quotes. This was one of the memorable ones: "That's the thing about people. You see only your interpretation of them and not what they actually are."

All in all, I admire this atypical attempt at a literary mystery, especially as this is a debut work. But the writing approach didn't work too well for me. I enjoy character-driven literary fiction, but in a story about a death, I expect closure.

Recommend to literary fiction readers who don't mind open endings. Not for those looking for a small-town murder mystery.

My thanks to Zando Projects and SJP Lit for providing the DRC of “Women and Children First” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.