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MATHILDA SAVITCH by Victor Lodato Kirkus Star

MATHILDA SAVITCH

by Victor Lodato

Pub Date: Sept. 22nd, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-20400-6
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A wildly precocious adolescent girl searches for the truth behind her sister’s death in playwright Lodato’s creative and engaging debut novel.

The author crafts a singular voice that combines the disjointed confessional tone of Holden Caulfield with the ethereal sadness of Susie Salmon in The Lovely Bones. The13-year-old narrator’s matter-of-fact reflections on her dysfunctional family hold the whole amazing concoction together. Mathilda Savitch is blessed with a unique point of view. “I’ve been told I have an ‘artistic temperament,’ ” she confides, “which means I have thoughts all over the place and not to be concerned.” A year after the mysterious death of her sister Helene, crushed under a train, Mathilda is on the trail of the killer, breaking into Helene’s e-mail account to flush out a suspect among her sister’s many boyfriends. Simultaneously she’s deceiving her shrink; trying to hold together the remains of her parents’ fractured marriage; and balancing her affections for best friend Anna McDougal with their mutual interest in a handsome young classmate. The story Lodato tells, while compulsively readable, isn’t the main selling point. It’s the way he occupies Mathilda so completely, giving her marvelous lines like, “Sometimes I’d think I’d like to be a person with brain damage, with nothing but the whale of joy jumping around inside of me,” or, “The thing is, I don’t want to end up like Ma and Da. In a house with books and dust and all the love gone out of it.” His portrait of a damaged but hopeful girl stands up to classics like Walter Tevis’ Queen’s Gambit (1983).

Crossover potential could be limited by some PG-13 material, but both mature adolescents and adult readers will find much to love in Lodato’s remarkable creation.