A Prayer for Travelers

May 1, 2019
A teenager in a small desert town desperately searches for her missing friend in this debut novel. Cale Lambert was born at the center of a mystery: Her mother abandoned her as an infant at the local hospital, and she was raised with no real knowledge of her parents by her maternal grandfather, whom everyone calls Lamb. As the novel begins, Cale is up against another mystery: Her friend, Penny Reyes, has vanished, leaving behind her cellphone, her emergency cash, and a smear of blood on her freezer door. In chapters that are numbered out of order like a shuffled deck of cards, Tomar flicks back and forth between the present, which includes Cale's search for Penny, her dealings with the town sheriff, her life at home with a cancer-riddled Lamb, and the recent past, when Cale uncovers secrets about the circles Penny ran in and gets drawn into the danger herself. The further Cale goes on her desperate quest, the more she understands the ways that violence and trauma can engulf a life like a wildfire. Tomar is a superb writer of place, whether describing the tiny desert town her characters inhabit, that "sprawl of dirt and char," or the rooms in which they live. But Cale herself is inaccessible; as a character, she is aloof and taciturn, and as a narrator, she is the same. We rarely, then, understand who she is, what she wants, or why she does what she does. This blurriness of character seems meant to resolve itself the closer Cale comes to finding the truth about Penny, but somehow, even as Cale tries to solve the mystery, she remains one herself. Tomar is unafraid of aesthetic and emotional difficulty, but the main character's inscrutability can sometimes undermine the story's power.

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May 13, 2019
The missing-person mystery at the heart of this riveting coming-of-age novel, Tomar’s debut, gives it a suspenseful edginess. When the reader is first introduced to 19-year-old diner waitress Cale Lambert, she’s nursing a newly acquired shiner and searching for her friend Penny, who uncharacteristically didn’t show up for work that day. That’s in chapter 31—the first chapter in the book. Employing authorial sleight-of-hand, Tomar intentionally scrambles the chronology of the chapters, the better to immerse the reader in the disorder and dysfunction that shape her characters’ lives. Gradually, the thread of Cale’s hardscrabble life teases out: her motherless childhood growing up in her grandfather’s house; her hiring at the diner where Penny works; her efforts to stay outside of Penny’s occasional drug deals with the local “tweakers, potheads, and pipe-fiends”; and, finally, the incident that precipitated Penny’s disappearance and Cale’s entanglement with the sheriff who is searching for her. As excellently drawn by Tomar, Cale and Penny are fierce survivors whose determination to escape their dead-end town and its stultifying way of life pulls the reader relentlessly along. Their story makes for a dramatic and vivid tale about people chafing against the desperation of their circumstances.

August 16, 2019

DEBUT In a hardscrabble desert town, Cale's friend Penny has gone missing. But the real mystery is Cale herself, abandoned at birth, raised by her grandfather, friendless in high school, then looped into her arrogant former classmate's glow until one fierce, mysterious moment shoves them apart and sends Cale on a quest to find Penny. The story moves back and forth in time, revealing Cale's difficult past; how she and sassy, disaffected waitress-with-a-dream Penny grew sort of close post high school; Cale's desperate attempts to draw information from Penny's scornful friends; a tragedy regarding her grandfather; and how violence steps in, with tension ramping up as we wonder not only what has happened to Penny but how Cale is implicated. Strikingly, the chapters are not presented in chronological order (e.g., the narrative opens with Chapter 31, then moves to Chapter 2, Chapter 5, and so forth), but there's no confusion; first novelist Tomar builds her narrative exactingly, with scenes effectively rubbing against each other to create decided frisson. VERDICT A fine character study of a struggling young woman, set in an arid Southwest that comes alive; gorgeous if relentless and heart-ripping. [See Prepub Alert, 1/7/19.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2019
Cale was raised by her grandfather after her mother left her in a hospital room as a baby. As a child, she followed him everywhere. Now nearing adulthood, she discovers he's kept a secret that makes her question her future. Furious and confused, Cale seeks out a life outside of home. She takes a job as a waitress alongside Penny, a girl she knew growing up, who shows her a darker side of their small Southwestern town. When Penny goes missing, Cale does everything she can to find her. Told in non-chronological chapters, Tomar's debut leads the reader through pivotal moments in Cale's life. The tension builds as the story weaves around incidents that Cale has hinted at previously. Through the lives of Cale and Penny, Tomar explores themes of family, love, and female-specific trauma. While at times the recurring motif of boundaries can feel overdone, Tomar succeeds in creating a suspenseful, haunting, coming-of-age story about a young woman facing an uncertain future.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)