Let’s No One Get Hurt

Pineda (Apology) crafts an evocative novel about the cruelty of children and the costs of poverty in the contemporary South. Fifteen-year-old Pearl lives a marginal life in a dilapidated boathouse with her father and two other adult men. Pearl, socially isolated among the scavenging adults and feeling stunted, meets Mason Boyd, son of the wealthy family who recently bought up the land she is squatting on. He and his friends cruise around the countryside on their golf carts and scheme ways to become internet famous through juvenile prank videos. As Pearl and spoiled, contemptuous Mason embark on a secret sexual relationship, she yearns for a more normal life and swallows the scorn of her peers. Pineda fleshes out the main plot with flashbacks that explain the absence of Pearl’s mother, her father’s loss of his university job, and the earlier joys of Pearl’s life. Poverty’s demands and racial violence hover around the novel’s events. In the horrifying climax, the disadvantaged are abused and treated as disposable by the privileged. This stark tale of slow-burning anguish will draw in readers with its lyrical prose and haunting images. [em](Mar.) [/em]