While enjoying their lunch break outdoors on Elita Island, home to a federal penitentiary, two prison guards encounter a feral child who appears to be around 12, but is actually 17. Because the girl, who\u2019s being called Atalanta Doe, doesn\u2019t speak, the social worker assigned to the case is elated when she hears about Professor Bernadette Baston: \u201cA woman child development specialist! How interesting, I thought,\u201d she tells Bernadette when they meet. Bernadette, a curiosity as a woman in the psychology department at Seattle\u2019s state university, specializes in language acquisition, but explains that she\u2019s a scholar and can\u2019t be expected to teach Atalanta to talk. Nevertheless, over the course of her visits with the girl, Bernadette becomes determined to learn how Atalanta got to the island, which will mean asking the area\u2019s residents unwelcome questions. As it happens, Bernadette, too, knows something about surviving on one\u2019s own: Her husband left four years earlier, when their daughter was an infant. Lunstrum builds her fathomlessly rich plot with sentences that suggest she has, as Bernadette describes a novelist\u2019s job, \u201ctaken a polishing cloth to the surface of every word.\u201d (Readers should be patient with early chapters that minutely recount what Bernadette acknowledges is \u201cthe teeming wildness\u201d of her thoughts.) The novel succeeds as both a mystery and a pitiless look at the burdens that have historically been particular to female parents and professionals. As Bernadette observes a Tacoma detective\u2019s lack of affect, she accepts that his \u201cflat, stone-faced approach is a privilege she\u2019ll never have.\u201d <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While enjoying their lunch break outdoors on Elita Island, home to a federal penitentiary, two prison guards encounter a feral child who appears to be around 12, but is actually 17. Because the girl, who\u2019s being called Atalanta Doe, doesn\u2019t speak, the social worker assigned to the case is elated when she hears about Professor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1674,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1673"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1673\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}