Published May 2026 via Guernica Editions
★★★★
1968: A girl is sentenced to stay in an institution for troubled youth for reasons she only sort of understands. She's twelve, and what she does understand is that numbers make sense in a way that people don't. She understands that home might not be a safe place, but this institution is not much better. She understands, eventually, that it might be a long time before she gets out. And she understands that this might be the thing that breaks her.
My I is fading so fast that it might not be here tomorrow. Soon all that will be left of me is the She that the counselors observe. (loc. 672*)
This is a tight, short, intense book. It's designed to make your heart quietly break for this girl, who has—through no fault of her own—virtually no options left. A math book in the institution library gives her some hope, but...there's not much else that does. There's the occasional adult who is kind, but many of them are overtly out for their own interests or just don't care; like our narrator, they too have perhaps gotten more jaded over time.
We see the events of this story through our narrator's lens as a child, not as someone looking back, so the change is gradual and subtle—a girl changing from someone innocent, someone with hope, to someone hardened and more desperate.
Though this takes place in 1968, much of it feels relevant for today, too—nothing I've read suggests that institutions are happier places for children now than they were then, and although there are different options in place for children for whom home is not safe, well...nothing I've read suggests that those options are great either.
Highly recommend; this is tightly written and quietly devastating.
*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.
Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.
