Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A quietly devastating debut novel about care as control. In this elegant and unsettling debut, Suzanna grows up making weekly visits to the women’s prison where her mother is serving a life sentence for a politically motivated bank robbery. “The Bureau of Prisons claimed to be in the business of custody, not punishment,” Suzanna observes, “but by all appearances they were in the business of construction.” Fences rise, gun towers appear, and the flat hilltop is given “the sense of a peak.” Progress, here, is not moral, but architectural. Clark’s great achievement is her dissection of the systems that train us for endurance. Life on the hill thins out quietly. Babies are carried away by nuns, women blur into one another, cats disappear, and trees are uprooted. In time, dogs and puppies are introduced, folded into the prison’s language of rehabilitation and care. The dogs do not undo the disappearance of the cats; they formalize it. After the death of Suzanna’s grandfather, the balance of power shifts to her dogmatic grandmother, who refuses to visit the prison and just as firmly refuses to grant her daughter’s “crime” any moral legitimacy. In the novel’s second half, Suzanna’s adolescence hardens the patterns of her childhood. Visits become a fragile, regulated intimacy, while the outside world proves to have its own limits and restrictions. Time itself becomes punitive. In the Hole, women are denied clocks. In the Roost, a small reading nook, Suzanna and her mother curl up close, inhabiting a rare interval where time briefly loosens its grip. In spare, luminous prose, Clark delivers a masterful study of internalized confinement and the quiet, fierce love that can persist within it. An intelligent coming-of-age novel that earns its unease. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.