Katherine Seligman's gripping debut novel, At the Edge of the Haight, explores a community on the edge of a historic setting and on the edge of getting by, with a compelling protagonist and an array of problems to wrestle with.
Twenty-year-old Maddy Donaldo lives in present-day Golden Gate Park with a sort of chosen family. There's Ash, "a skinny upside-down triangle" of a young man. Quiet, gentle, strawberry-blond Fleet has a pet rat named Tiny. Spike-haired Hope talks to everyone; she's good with the tourists, but a bit of an instigator, too. And, most importantly, there's Root, Maddy's devoted dog. Together the friends scavenge food, find shelter, protect one another and navigate their tricky streets. It is Root who leads Maddy into the bushes in the first pages of this absorbing novel, where she stumbles upon a young man taking his last breath, and a man standing over him.
Maddy knows immediately that this sight will haunt her, that she is in danger. She's been handed a problem she didn't earn; quickly the death of the boy named Shane follows her. The cops have questions. A man shows up at the local shelter and identifies himself as Shane's father and asks for Maddy's help. She investigates Shane's murder, and along the way alienates her friends and finds herself nudged toward her own past, which she most wants to avoid.
At the Edge of the Haight is told in quiet prose from Maddy's first-person point of view. Seligman's San Francisco is colorful and detailed. Readers are drawn into a challenging world with sympathetic characters, but it is Maddy's internal turmoil that makes this novel memorable. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia