A review by speculativebecky
The Narrows by Ann Petry

5.0

The Narrows reminds me of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, kicked up to 100 miles per hour. It’s the story of a place, Monmouth, Connecticut, aka The Narrows, and of about a dozen characters hurtling towards one another and their inevitable collisions. Petry has a unique and powerful writing style, her characters’ inner monologues spill out onto the page, running back over themselves again and again, the way the mind does as it splices together memory and the current moment. An incisive look at race in 1950’s America, I won’t soon forget this sharply drawn cast of characters, or the way this small-town epic story made me feel. Petry is an extraordinary writer, and this book is a masterpiece.