Let's No One Get Hurt

"I know I'm not a woman yet. But I'm also not a girl. I'm a poem no one will ever translate." With Let's No One Get Hurt, Jon Pineda (Apology) offers a wild, yearning, strong-willed protagonist and a novel with both tenderness and violence at its core. Pearl lives in an abandoned boathouse with her father and two other adult men. Dox and Fritter are father and son, and they form a family of sorts, subsisting on catfish and crayfish from the river, mushrooms and wild rice from the woods and building scraps from the wealthy subdivision nearby.

Pearl's coming-of-age and her troubled liaison with the upper-class boys who live in the development near her makeshift home define the novel's timeline. As she grows up, her old dog, Marianne Moore, is dying. Her father, a former poetry professor who named the dog after one of his favorite subjects, also suffers from increasingly poor health. Fritter paints a never-ending mural of pitch black, and Dox noodles on his cigar-box guitar.

Pearl's mother was a scholar who said that "poems were never finished, that they were only abandoned." Pearl likes to think that maybe all abandoned things are poems. She lives in an abandoned place; maybe she lives inside a poem.

Let's No One Get Hurt is thick with the lush warmth of the American South and the harshness of a life scavenged out-of-doors, and Pineda's teenaged girl's perspective is spot-on. This novel of exploration, exploitation and the poetry in it all will stun readers of all kinds, especially those who appreciate strong characters and tough choices. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Powered by: Xtenit