I had never heard of this book by Percival Everett before my book club elected to discuss it. Apparently Everett is a very prolific author, but I don’t think I had ever heard of him before someone nominated this book for our book club.
It’s well written, but I don’t think I liked it.
SPOILER ALERT!
This is a very short book, so I can’t really talk about any of it without getting into spoilers, so consider yourself warned. The book is told in first person from the perspective of the main character, Zach Wells, a black man living in Los Angeles. When his 12-year-old daughter, Sarah, starts having seizures, the pediatrician sends them to a specialist, who diagnoses her with a rare genetic disorder called Batten’s Disease. It means her brain will deteriorate, much like someone with dementia or Alzheimer’s, until she dies. There is no cure.
Around the same time, Wells has been ordering clothing online and they keep coming with tiny pieces of paper tucked into them that say things in Spanish like, “Help”, and “They won’t let us leave”.
So, while his daughter is dying, he abandons both her and his wife to drive to New Mexico where his clothes are shipped from and investigate. Leaving his wife to nurse their dying daughter alone is something I cannot forgive, no matter how much he admits it was a shitty thing to do. Actually, admitting how shitty it is and still doing it might even make it worse.
He does manage to come to his senses and go back home to be with his daughter in her last days, which are not elaborated upon. There’s barely a mention of her death or funeral, and it seems like as soon as the funeral is over, he’s back in New Mexico trying to figure out how to help these trapped women he’s never met and has no connection to.
It quickly becomes apparent that the police are worse than useless, but Zach manages to make a friend who brings some of her friends and they all help the women escape their captors, but can they make it to the Mexico border to return the women to their home town? Zach has managed to get a Mexican cop to agree to meet them at the border, but the last two times he calls the cop to update him, he doesn’t answer, which is not a good sign. Then they have to go to a hospital because one of the women was shot during the escape attempt and she’s not likely to make it to the border without medical attention. Whether she’ll be able to make it after a hospital stay is equally uncertain, and Everett never bothers to answer that question for us. They get to the hospital and the book just ends.
Apparently there are three different versions of this book, and in each one Zach makes different choices that lead to slightly different consequences. Since I only read the one book (and I have no desire to read more by Everett), I can’t tell you how significant or insignificant those changes were.
Also, I have no idea where the book got its title.