Category: Books for Adults

I couldn’t tear myself away from this novel.  It opens with Noa P. Singleton, inmate number 10271978 in the Pennsylvania Institute for Women, introducing herself and telling us that “…I pulled the trigger. Post-conviction, I never contested that once.”  She is on death row and nearing her execution date.

Noa is unnervingly calm as she begins to tell us the back story.  She is adamant about her guilt and sees the past ten years spent in prison and her impending execution as the logical outcome of her crime, the murder of pregnant Sarah Dixon.  She isn’t even particularly ruffled when high-powered attorney Marlene Dixon, Sarah’s mother, visits her to announce that she no longer believes in the death penalty and will be pursuing a clemency petition for Noa.   Marlene just wants to know why — why did Noa shoot her daughter?  Noa has never answered this question publicly, and does not intend to now.  Noa’s story is so knotted and convoluted that it takes the entire book to tease it out.

This novel is about identity– self-identity and imposed identity, and about all of the little (and enormous) factors that go into making us who we are, or, at least, the factors that propel us to a certain place and time and point of action.  The opening passage sets the tone beautifully:

In this world, you are either good or evil.  If not, then a court or a teacher or a parent is bound to tag your identity before you’ve had a chance to figure it out on your own.  The gray middle ground, that mucous-thin terrain where most of life resides, is really only a temporary annex, like gestation or purgatory.

In telling Noa’s story, author Silver does not tackle the morality of capital punishment directly.  She never asks us explicitly if Noa deserves to be on death row.  She doesn’t push us to judge.  Feel as you will about capital punishment, she seems to say, but consider the person; consider the process.  And then maybe consider it all a little further. Noa P. Singleton is subtle, complex and quite stunning.

Main character Rosemary has lost so much, and in the course of her narration she revisits episodes from her past, trying to make sense of that loss and reexamining her own role in her family’s tragedy.

When she was five, Rosemary lost her sister and still harbors guilt over events leading to that loss. Soon after, her only other sibling, brother Lowell, left home in grief and anger and never returned. Left alone with her scientist parents, her father drinking and her mother unhinged, raw, and remote, Rosemary grows into a self-conscious, directionless misfit.

When you learn that the sister Rosemary is mourning is a chimpanzee named Fern, brought to live with the family as an experiment in human-chimpanzee communication, you may wonder why Rosemary’s sense of loss is so profound. But Fowler develops these characters- including Fern- so thoroughly, and portrays their relationships in such glimmering lucidity, that by the end there is no denying that Rosemary and Fern bonded as sisters, twins. Rosemary did not lose a test subject, a friend, or a pet; she lost her sister, her other half.

As Lowell’s animal rights crusades garner FBI attention and Rosemary stumbles through college life in a haze of longing, the circumstances of Fern’s removal from the family are slowly revealed. Which leads to the question, so consuming to Rosemary and reader alike: where is Fern? Is she still alive? Communication from Lowell, now a fugitive, leads Rosemary to finally confront her past.

Guilt, family dynamics, ethics, animal rights, humanity and humanness all wind through the story, making it so compelling, so impossible to put down. It is a credit to Fowler that she does not romanticize Fern’s place in the family.

In the mid-1940s, ten year-old Helen lives in a rambling old house, formerly a convalescent home, on a mountain in North Carolina. Her mother is long dead, her beloved grandmother has just passed away, and her father is leaving for the summer to work in Tennessee. Her father recruits a distant cousin, 22-year-old Flora from Alabama, to stay with Helen for the summer. Helen considers Flora a country bumpkin and a twit. Flora has suffered losses of her own and is determined to connect with and care for Helen. Helen learns to tolerate Flora’s pink-cheeked guilelessness when she realizes that Flora is a source of information about Helen’s mother and grandmother. Helen pastes together the snippets of family history revealed by Flora and begins to see a different picture of the past than she had imagined.

Foreshadowing is thick and ever present as Helen narrates their story from a decades-later vantage point, beginning with the lovely opening line:

There are things we can’t undo, but perhaps there is a kind of constructive remorse that could transform regrettable acts into something of service to life.

It is clear that this summer isn’t going to go well for Helen, and waiting for that pivotal moment when we finally learn why is a perfectly measured torture.

There are so many layers to this novel, and days after finishing it I am still turning each facet over in my mind, finding connections and consequences and entertaining “what-ifs.” This is one for my top 10 list. A must-read.