Renee M.P.T. Kray

Girl in Snow by Danya Kukafka. Published by Simon and Schuster, 2017. 357 pages.

I am used to the first sentence of a book being unique, interesting, or beautiful, as authors always want to start off on the right foot with their audiences. But I think it’s very possible that Girl in Snow has my favorite opening line ever:

When they told him Lucinda Hayes was dead, Cameron thought of her shoulder blades and how they framed her naked spine, like a pair of static lungs (Kukafka, 4).

I think this book has been misinterpreted a lot, if the reviews on Goodreads are any indication. The first line of the description on the inside jacket (“When a beloved high schooler named Lucinda Hayes is found murdered…”) gives the initial impression that this is going to be a murder mystery, and the readers who picked up this book expecting just that have been (and will continue to be) disappointed. A few lines later, the description tells what this is really about: “In the aftermath of the tragedy, these three indelible characters – Cameron, Jade, and Russ – must each confront their darkest secrets in an effort to find solace, the truth, or both.” This is a character study about the reactions that some very different people have to one tragedy. This is not a whodunnit mystery, and readers looking for something like that will be frustrated by trying to impose that story arc onto Girl in Snow. With that being said, if you are looking for a mesmerizing dive into someone’s mind, this is the novel for you.

Now, on to the book itself.

This novel is divided into three different perspectives, as mentioned in the above quote from the blurb. We start and end with Cameron, which is fitting as he is the single most intriguing character here. But the other two – Jade, an angry teenaged girl, and Russ, a seasoned cop stuck in a bad marriage – are no less interesting or well developed.

Jade is typical, but by no means does she become boring. In what I find to be a stroke of particular genius, Kukafka is able to have Jade be the teenaged girl who never says what she’s really thinking and at the same time tell us EXACTLY what Jade is thinking. She does this by interspersing Jade’s narrative with small screenplay scenes from a script titled “Things You Want to Say but Can’t Without Being a Dick.” In these scenes, Jade, in her alter-ego as Celly, rewrites scenarios we’ve seen her actually experience in the course of the novel, only this time they go the way she wants them to and she says everything that’s on her mind. In this way, Kukafka brilliantly avoids the problem that so many writers of angry teen girls fall into: the characters become so wrapped up in their anger and lies that they refuse to be open with anyone, including the audience. We get to know not only who Jade wants to be but also who she really is. As a huge plus, Jade is not one of the characters who is upset and dismissive of everyone simply because she’s that age. We get to see real motivations from her, motivations that explain who she is and why she says what she says. And when it comes to Lucinda, we get a refreshing perspective through Jade’s eyes, because Jade doesn’t canonize her the way that people tend to do to a victim after a tragic loss. Jade is adamant about who Lucinda was: the “perfect” girl, one who got more jobs than Jade and took Jade’s crush for her own. But Jade’s belief that she is being somehow contacted by Lucinda and her own feelings of guilt for her potential involvement in Lucinda’s tragedy give her a believable reason to help solve the murder without compromising her opinions on the dead girl. When I started reading Jade, I wanted to roll my eyes because I was expecting yet another teen emo girl stereotype. And while Jade is not necessarily anything we haven’t seen before, the way she is told is so open and so brilliant that I was thoroughly impressed.

Russ also seems like something of a stereotype character… tough cop who is involved in solving a murder, nothing more. But it turns out that he is much more intertwined in this story than that. We get to find out about his wife, Ines, whose brother is the night janitor who found Lucinda’s body. Russ’ distrust of his brother-in-law is so extreme that he even suggests him as a suspect, much to the detriment of his already strained marriage. We also find out that Russ’ old partner was Cameron’s father, the cop who was arrested for an unspeakable crime. Although Russ adds a much-needed break from the teenaged mindset, and his struggles to open up to his wife are real and relatable, I still found him to be the least interesting part of this novel. I was very intrigued by his friendship with Cameron’s dad because it opened up the question of just how much is owed to a friend and how that debt should be repaid, but I personally found that question to be a little undermined when the idea of a sexual attraction was introduced between them. As the one perspective that really asked “how is friendship changed by tragedy,” it was a bit of a bummer when sexual heat was tacked on there almost as an afterthought. Everything else dealt with romance, in this novel. Please let friendship have its day, too.

Cameron is the son of said notorious cop. Cameron looks just like his dad and seemed to share more in common with the defamed parent than he does with his devoted mother, including some less than savory tendencies. This would be his stalking of Lucinda Hayes. Every night he goes outside and pretends to be a statue, standing in the shadows so that he can observe everyone without them seeing him. The most intense object of his vigilance is Lucinda, whom he believes himself to be in love with. Of course, when Lucinda is found murdered, the entire town suspects that Cameron did it in a very like-father-like-son way, but Cameron is so incredibly sweet that it is impossible to believe he would be involved in something like this.

At least, that’s the case for the first half of the novel.

I think Cameron was the most interesting and unique character in this novel, and I think about him post-read more than any of the others. His whole existence is bound up in answering the question of how much a person is defined by their parents, and his tortured life is very well written. However, towards the end of the book, he starts to take twists that I had not expected, and which I didn’t entirely appreciate. His relationship with Lucinda starts to be described as very sexual, which makes the audience wonder if he really did do it. While I appreciate the twist in my own perspective as a reader, it could have been done without the sexual addition. Maybe I’m showing my age, but I just don’t want to read about kids rearranging their dicks while staring at a girl through her window. It takes away what Cameron has been telling us the entire book: that he loves Lucinda in a pure, almost childlike way. When he breaks into her house during her wake, steals her dress, and tries to put it on, I was thoroughly lost. Is he trying to become her? I thought he loved admiring her from afar? Cameron’s character became disjointed in the latter half of the book, turning almost entirely different from his character in the first half. This time could have been put to better use explaining why he loved Lucinda, because we never get a real reason. The closest we get is a halfhearted attempt at saying that he doesn’t even understand it, himself:

Cameron had not chosen Lucinda. She was simply brighter than anyone else. And Cameron’s Collections – Lucinda had planted them, and they’d grown and made him better. He liked her tan body and her ski-jump nose. And Lucinda had that pull. Like she’d unraveled his intestines, tied them to his bedpost, and was tugging him back there, inch by painstaking inch (173).

I’m sorry, but this is not enough. When did they first meet? Was she kind to him? Why her, of all the girls? Why does she shine brighter?

Answering those questions could have shed some much-needed light on the character of Lucinda. I expected her to become more of a figurehead than an actual character, because she’s dead and can’t speak for herself, but honestly there still could have been something more. All we really know about Lucinda is that she somehow was “brighter” in Cameron’s eyes and that she slept with people a lot…. Like dang, this girl is only fifteen? Kids these days.

I think that the ending was satisfying. The answer of “who killed her” is given to us, and we see an appropriate conclusion for all our characters. But it did feel a little rushed in moments, such as when the murder weapon is talked about being found and is only given a sentence or two. Considering that we spent so much time hearing about Cameron sneaking into houses and trying on dead girl clothes, you’d think that we could have a little bit more effort put into the finale.

Regardless of which character is speaking, the prose is brilliant and inspired. There was not one dull sentence in this book, and I would have been willing to keep turning the pages forever just to get more of it. I mean really, just read this description of a setting, for crying out loud:

The Thornton’s toddler was wailing in the pew behind them, shrill and unrelenting – both parents tried desperately to calm her. Cameron stared at Ronnie, sandwiched between his parents’ backs, flakes of dandruff snowing across his wiry shoulders and down his crinkly black shirt. There was a vase of orchids next to Lucinda’s photo; the petals blossomed up from a single stem, then arched back toward the ground in surrender. And the eye of the flower (the stamen, which held the ovaries and the ovule, where the pollen was produced) — looked like a human skull made of silk (191).

Damn!

All in all, my complaints are minor in comparison to the positives about this book. We really get to dig deep into these characters’ minds, including their pasts, presents, and hopeful futures. No stone is left unturned. We get complete access to their minds, and I am finding it more and more rare to discover an author who is willing to unearth their characters so fully. It’s brilliant and haunting, it just gets caught up in itself a little bit too much towards the end, and considering that it’s an almost 400 page book, that’s pretty impressive to be its only real fault.

4.5 stars.