DARIA'S PLAN

In this debut novel, an American mother’s criminal past follows her to Canada.

Daria Montero needs to get out of Baltimore. She grew up on the streets, and her son’s father, Ray, is an active member of the Crips—in addition to being an abusive gambler. But she’s finally decided she wants a better life for herself and 12-year-old Liam away from the violence and the drugs. Knowing she’ll have to leave the country in order to escape the reach of Ray and the Crips, she decides to sneak into Canada. Once over the border, she finds a job, rents an apartment, and sets up a new life for herself and Liam in Ottawa, complete with Canadian IDs—which turn out to be surprisingly easy to acquire. She parlays a job at a strip club into a technologist position at a nearby office of Canada’s defense department, and she soon rises through the ranks thanks to little more than her ingenuity and people skills. Then her new Canadian life is threatened when an old connection from Baltimore—one with ties to the Cuban government—blackmails Daria into passing him data about Canadian and American defense systems. Caught between the threat of discovery on one side and the guarantee of it on the other, Daria is forced to put all her skills of deceit and invention to the test. Reid’s prose is workmanlike, and his narrative voice is not nearly as smooth or adaptive as his protagonist: “At her job, Daria continued working almost entirely on image-building and making herself look good. Everything she did at work now went exclusively towards enhancing how others perceived her. She started wearing new outfits she had recently acquired—dressed to the hilt, as the guys put it.” Still, Daria’s inventiveness is entertaining, and readers will become quickly invested in her plight. Unfortunately, the author opts to tell Daria’s story primarily through exposition, with relatively few scenes outside of terse dialogue exchanges. Readers will be left feeling as though they are reading the summary of an immersive novel rather than the book itself.

A fun premise that’s hampered by uneven prose.