A Little Luck

Piñeiro (Elena Knows) offers an engaging story of a woman’s reinvention and reckoning with the past. It’s been 20 years since brown-eyed, red-haired Mary Lohan was in Buenos Aires, where she was the blue-eyed blonde María Elena. Mary’s American partner died recently in Boston, and she doesn’t know the status of her Argentine husband, whom she left in the wake of an accident, the details of which Piñeiro doles out slowly. Now, Mary is back, sent by a college prep program to evaluate the suburban private school Saint Peter’s for affiliation. As María, she lived near Saint Peter’s; after the accident, she became the neighborhood’s “sad celebrity.” Consequently, she’s both afraid of being recognized and perturbed when people don’t know who she was. During one of her teacher interviews, Mary’s composure and her barrier of secrecy are shattered. Though the details around her accident and her ensuing actions are presented a bit too tidily, the revelations hit hard nonetheless, as does Piñeiro’s account of how María was treated as a monster by her community before she left. It adds up to a striking meditation on loss and the search for home. (July)