She

March 21, 2016
It’s 2013, and on the eve of her 15th birthday, a young, nameless girl runs away from her sheltered family home in Needles, Ca., to take refuge in Los Angeles. She is trying to escape her violent religious upbringing, and though she knows nobody when she arrives in LA, she soon encounters a series of interesting characters—a gallery owner, an old man looking for company, and a homeless woman lugging a suitcase full of books, to name a few—as she tries to find a place to sleep for the night. Author Latiolais (Widow) breaks up this main narrative by inserting a series of independent short stories, also revolving around other (mostly) nameless female protagonists. Despite their various conflicts, these women—a ballerina sitting at her engagement party, a botanist turned cake decorator listening to a friend’s marital suspicions, a niece waiting to hear news of her elderly aunt’s cancer surgery—share emotional discomfort with Latiolais’s runaway, and the author finds ways to weave some of their smaller stories into the collection’s main story. Overall, this is a volume in which characters stall their own forward propulsion with unending ruminations. Though some stories, like the sharp “Promotion,” succeed, others feel lost in an overabundance of tangential prose.

March 1, 2016
A 15-year-old girl runs away from an abusive home to find refuge and new worlds among the varied populations of Los Angeles. The first pages of this hybrid novel/story collection by Latiolais (Widow, 2011) tell us immediately where we are: in the realm of poetic, gestural, and not always informative writing. The first paragraph relates that the unnamed narrator was home-schooled and "learning to add had been learning to collect any denomination of coin or bill until she'd had enough to buy this one bus ticket"--which suggests a fairly hardscrabble life and not very good home schooling. But on the next page, in a tallying of the resources she has to survive, the narrator thinks of the "addition and subtraction, fractions and the rudimentary algebra she had loved." So home schooling had been more rigorous than was first suggested, and her math skills go beyond figuring out the price of a bus ticket. Small discrepancies like these keep us from feeling we really understand the girl's background, though other details are well-chosen, such as her love of sugar and her plump figure. There is something appealing about this courageous young girl who escapes a brutal father, but her path is unrealistically smooth, and we don't get to see her coping with adversity. That she is a naif with old-fashioned diction is believable, since she was raised by conservative Christians, but the number of people she meets who take an interest in her is not. From the first man she gets a ride from to a kindly gallery owner to an even kindlier old man, the girl is taken care of in a way that doesn't seem believable for teen runaways today. Undercutting the persuasiveness of this narrative still further are the stories that punctuate it--a strange choice for a book, making it neither novel nor story collection--because the characters in the stories seem more alive than the shadowy "she." By the end, Latiolais has sketched a broad tapestry of LA characters, which was presumably the point of the book, but it asks a lot of the reader to stay with the shifts in narrators and even genres in this slim volume. This book is weakened by lack of a driving narrative and details that would bring the main character into clearer focus.

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May 1, 2016
On the eve of her fifteenth birthday, she escapes Needles, Arizona, and the violence of her religious-extremist father, and arrives in Los Angeles, seeking freedom and work. Preternaturally alert, determined, and resourceful, she encounters a gallery owner, a gay man grieving for his lover, a botanist who makes elegant, scientifically correct sugar flowers, and a woman wandering the streets with a suitcase full of old books. As this unnamed runaway wanders the city, Latiolais (Widow, 2011) contrasts her radiance and nature's glory with Los Angeles' opulent, often grotesque iconography of desire. The young survivor's adventuresepisodes of breathtaking sensitivity and unexpected gracealternate with short stories portraying other loners under pressure, including a dancer, a woman working at a rectory, and a woman in a hospital waiting room. A writer of delving insight and exhilarating exactitude in the mode of Lucia Berlin and Amy Hempel, Latiolais deftly contrasts moments of kindness and connection with shocking eruptions of lustful violence. Entrancing and rigorous, arch and jolting, Latiolais' concentrated and astute dramas illuminate loneliness, womanhood, and the quest for meaning.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)