WHERE WE LIVED

A first novel about five girls raised in the same town trying to survive painful childhoods and learn how to live on their own.

Like many MFAs, Fitzpatrick writes polished, elegant prose in service of a plot so carefully crafted and a concept so painstakingly worked out that the end result is a wan, bloodless read. Tanya, Mia, Gwen, Emma, and Claire all grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. All were friends at one time or another, some closer than others, and all are terminally self-absorbed and despairing—these are not the plucky March girls cheerfully taking troubles on the chin. Tanya, who lives in a rundown part of the town, has a sadistic brother who locks her in a closet until her overworked single mother takes action. Mia’s mentally ill father committed suicide when she was young; later, after she graduated from high school and went to college in Boston, she eased her grief by taking drugs and drinking too much. After her friend Emma is murdered back home and another college friend continues to self-destruct, Mia realizes she can save only herself. Gwen, another member of the quintet, is a beauty, but her life is shadowed by her Vietnam vet father’s drinking and a brutal sexual assault in college. Before she was murdered at 19, Emma had survived a lonely childhood as her hardworking mother tried to raise her without the help of her deadbeat alcoholic dad. Many of the chapters are narrated by Claire, who recalls her worries when brother Steve served in the Gulf War and chronicles her worst summer, the one before she moved to Boston, when a neighbor immolated herself and a thug tried to attack her while she was swimming. Claire then relates how she finally broke away from an abusive college boyfriend and moved to New York . . . to be a writer.

Earnest and conventional takes on growing up, too carefully wrought to resonate.