Let's No One Get Hurt

December 11, 2017
Pineda (Apology) crafts an evocative novel about the cruelty of children and the costs of poverty in the contemporary South. Fifteen-year-old Pearl lives a marginal life in a dilapidated boathouse with her father and two other adult men. Pearl, socially isolated among the scavenging adults and feeling stunted, meets Mason Boyd, son of the wealthy family who recently bought up the land she is squatting on. He and his friends cruise around the countryside on their golf carts and scheme ways to become internet famous through juvenile prank videos. As Pearl and spoiled, contemptuous Mason embark on a secret sexual relationship, she yearns for a more normal life and swallows the scorn of her peers. Pineda fleshes out the main plot with flashbacks that explain the absence of Pearl’s mother, her father’s loss of his university job, and the earlier joys of Pearl’s life. Poverty’s demands and racial violence hover around the novel’s events. In the horrifying climax, the disadvantaged are abused and treated as disposable by the privileged. This stark tale of slow-burning anguish will draw in readers with its lyrical prose and haunting images.

January 15, 2018
A fascinating story of a teenage girl squatting with her father and dealing with the aftershocks of familial trauma in the rural South.Some stories seem to be on a path to an unpleasant resolution from the beginning. Such is the case with Pineda's (Apology, 2017, etc.) new novel: narrator Pearl is a teenager living in an abandoned boathouse with her father, a former college professor, and two friends of the family after her father lost his job and their family crumbled. Some legacies of Pearl's old life remain, including an elderly dog named after the acclaimed poet Marianne Moore. The dog's failing health, and the need to euthanize her, is the note on which the book opens, and it provides a running theme across its pages, a reminder of the fragility and impermanence of life. Early on in the novel, Pearl meets a young man she dubs "Main Boy," a boorish child of privilege who traverses the landscape with a gang of friends--a group that Pearl refers to as "the flies." Main Boy turns out to be the son of the man who owns the land on which Pearl and her makeshift family are squatting; that his behavior toward her is predatory is further evidence that things will not end well. Pearl periodically flashes back to a time when her mother was still present, and the family dynamics there have their own unnerving moments. Pineda has a great ear for dialogue and the ability to sustain an ominous mood; it all contributes to a solid sense of place and the impermanence thereof.Though its narrative focus can at times feel almost claustrophobic, this novel's terrific sense of place, haunting character dynamics, and assured narrative voice make it memorable.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 1, 2018

A disgraced white professor and his 15-year-old daughter, Pearl, live off the grid in an abandoned boathouse in the deep South with an African American father/son duo. The chronically dirty and disheveled Pearl encounters the leader of a bunch of rich kids who ride around in tricked-out golf carts. Soon Mason Boyd, or "Main Boy," and Pearl are involved in a very secret and sexual relationship. There are lots of incidents, some more interesting than others--theft of an expensive fly rod, a raft trip, disruption of a Civil War reenactment, a heart attack--but there's not a whole lot of plot. The sad centerpiece is when the rich kids, sans Martin, trick Pearl into getting dressed up for a "dance," which is actually a planned torture session. VERDICT This new work from the author of Apology, a Milkweed National Fiction Prize, is not really a coming-of-age story; Pearl at the end is pretty much like Pearl at the beginning. The work stands up as a local-color Southern gothic, but the whole is exceeded by the sum of the parts. [See Prepub Alert, 10/5/17.]--Robert E. Brown, Oswego, NY

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2017

Deep in the American South, 15-year-old Pearl is squatting in a derelict boathouse with her disgraced college professor dad when she encounters wealthy wild boy Mason Boyd, whose father has just bought the land where Pearl is living. Clearly, theirs will not be a relationship of equals, and clearly things will end badly. From the author of Apology, a Milkweed National Fiction Prize, and the Discover Great New Writers memoir Sleep in Me.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.