Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by beejoli
Sing Her Down by Ivy Pochoda
4.0
I’m already a fan of Ivy Pochoda, who writes gritty LA noir type novels about women and how they move and carry themselves in an unforgiving city (see: These Women). This was another hit for me: a meditation on female rage, told through the cat and mouse story of two recently released prison inmates, Florida and Diosmary.
Pochoda’s Florida is a richly drawn character, a woman grappling with the reality of who she is while knowing she presents as the embodiment of growing up in LA’s privileged class. It would have been easy to write Florida as a Piper Kerman-type, but Pochoda instead uses Florida as a way to look past just the inflection points that change someone’s life, in favor of reading the clues of who they always have been; clues that had been hiding in plain sight all along. She goes deep on Florida grappling with understanding who she’s become compared to who she always was, and the revelations Florida came to didn’t seem standard or forced.
My only flag was that I was left wanting a little more about Diosmary’s backstory, though I do think that Pochoda was purposely spare in her prose about Dios, specifically to illustrate something else she brings up in the novel: that sometimes people just are who they are, no matter how little or how much we know about them.
I enjoyed this read and will continue to read more of Pochoda’s books on difficult women.
Pochoda’s Florida is a richly drawn character, a woman grappling with the reality of who she is while knowing she presents as the embodiment of growing up in LA’s privileged class. It would have been easy to write Florida as a Piper Kerman-type, but Pochoda instead uses Florida as a way to look past just the inflection points that change someone’s life, in favor of reading the clues of who they always have been; clues that had been hiding in plain sight all along. She goes deep on Florida grappling with understanding who she’s become compared to who she always was, and the revelations Florida came to didn’t seem standard or forced.
My only flag was that I was left wanting a little more about Diosmary’s backstory, though I do think that Pochoda was purposely spare in her prose about Dios, specifically to illustrate something else she brings up in the novel: that sometimes people just are who they are, no matter how little or how much we know about them.
I enjoyed this read and will continue to read more of Pochoda’s books on difficult women.