Ivy Pochoda (These Women; Wonder Valley) unleashes a combination of raw energy and poignant loss in Sing Her Down, a ferocious, feminist western. After just a few years in prison, Florence "Florida" Baum is told she qualifies for early release because the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is endangering prisoners. But, Florida soon realizes there are two catches. First, she must stay in Arizona, despite desperately wanting to return to her home of Los Angeles. And second, violent and volatile fellow inmate Dios is getting out, too. Florida, born and raised in wealth and privilege, claims she's different from the other women she's been with in captivity, but Dios is determined to prove to Florida that there is as much darkness inside Florida as there is inside herself.
Pochoda's succinct, tense prose sets readers balancing on a tightrope from the start. Told in clipped, atmospheric sections from the perspective of Dios, Florida, an inmate named Kace who hears the voices and stories of others in her mind, and Lobos, a cop with her own troubled past that she wants to escape, Sing Her Down keeps readers destabilized, running from one haunted voice to the next. In this way, even as Florida and Dios chase each other across Covid-ravaged deserts and through the bleak streets of Los Angeles's Skid Row, the novel projects a shared but claustrophobic female psyche, characterized by desperation and anger. Kace declares from the start: "These women--their mistake was in thinking they burned with their own unique rage. Something deeper, darker than what the rest of us feel. Let me tell you--inside we all rage the same."
As these combustible voices ignite one another, it is Florida's story that takes center stage, positioning her as the novel's troubled protagonist. But while the novel invokes the classic western showdown of the hero facing off with a villain both in its opening imagery and in its breathless conclusion, Pochoda refuses to make Dios--or any other woman in this blistering and uncanny world--an easy villain. Instead, like in any good western, the showdown is really a face-off between the protagonist and herself: between what she has been, what she could be, and what she chooses, in the face of all the neglect and violence she's endured, to become. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor
Shelf Talker: A gritty thriller with a fiery heart, Sing Her Down is a pulse-pounding western with a devastating message about the oft-forgotten explosions made by women the world tries hard not to see.