LIZZY BABY

In Blanchard’s debut novella, a young farm girl experiences multiple traumas.

Nine-year-old Liz Walters has been sent on a mission by her 10-year-old best friend, Stefanie Jacobson, to scout out the playground at the shuttered school near the Walters’ Western Massachusetts farm. Liz looks up to Stefanie, whose wealthy family moved to the area from Boston, and will do almost anything the other girl suggests. The friends hope to use the partially disassembled playground as a training course for “ninja games,” but when Liz tries to swing on a swing-set bar by herself, she gets stuck and wets her pants. Her 20-year-old cousin Joey, who happens to be nearby, gets her unstuck, but their past interactions have often made her uncomfortable: “When she was five and he was sixteen, he told her to look in his pockets for money….Sometimes, during those ‘magic tricks,’ she’d been vaguely aware of another bulge, in his lap.” When they get back to the farm, Liz learns that her heifer, Belle, will be bred by a bull on a neighboring farm, and her parents say that she’ll have to be present to watch and learn what the breeding process is like. While Stefanie gets her own pony, Liz is forced to witness a brutal side of animal husbandry. After that, the young girl has another terrible experience involving Joey. Blanchard’s prose is precise and economical, carefully delineating the different worlds that Liz and Stefanie inhabit, as when Liz’s mother tells her that she can’t invite Stefanie to Belle’s breeding: “She’s not from a farm family, she wouldn’t understand….This is family business. Farm business.” Liz is a well-drawn and compelling protagonist, which makes her many trials that much harder for the reader to stomach. The other characters, too, are smartly constructed, adding to the tale’s believability. This is a dark story that clearly telegraphs where it’s going, goes there in detail, and lingers on the aftermath. The ending is perhaps not quite as skillful as what comes before it, but overall, Liz’s experience provides a damning look at the ways that people refuse to see what they don’t want to see.

A controlled, haunting tale of abuse and betrayal.