Girl in Snow

June 5, 2017
Kukafka’s debut is set in 2005, unspooling in the days after 15-year-old Lucinda Hayes is found murdered at a playground in her Colorado suburb. Suspicion immediately falls on Cameron Whitley, an artsy loner who spends his nights wandering the neighborhood, watching Lucinda and her family from their front yard. But there are other suspects, too, like Ivan, the ex-con school janitor, and Zap, Lucinda’s ex-boyfriend. Consisting of alternating chapters following Cameron; officer Russ Fletcher, who was once work partners with Cameron’s estranged policeman father; and Jade Dixon-Burns, a gloomy teen dabbling in the occult and aspiring to be a writer, the novel digs into each character’s history while offering up a fair number of red herrings regarding the identity of the murderer. These histories occasionally distract from the mystery of Lucinda’s killer, yet Kukafka’s clever narrative tricks, like Jade’s tendency to imagine conversations in the form of screenplays and Cameron’s inability to remember large swaths of time around the murder, propel the narrative forward. And while the novel employs a full checklist of teen tropes throughout, from abusive parents to fractured love triangles, there is enough narrative muscle to compel the reader to stick with it until the end. Agent: Dana Murphy, the Book Group.

June 1, 2017
When lovely 15-year-old Lucinda Hayes is murdered on a playground in a placid Colorado town, the prime suspect is one of her classmates.The first of three narrators in Kukafka's debut is the perhaps mentally ill ninth-grader Cameron Whitley. Utterly obsessed with Lucinda, for years he has spent all his time stalking her, drawing her, and thinking about her. He saw her the night of her death, and now he somehow has her purple suede diary, which he puts in his closet along with his Collection of the Pencil Bodies, his Collection of People Who Did Terrible Things, and others. "The only one hidden in his head was the Collection of Statue Nights"--his peeping-Tom forays--"this was his favorite Collection, because it was full of Lucinda." Well, we readers weren't born yesterday, so clearly it's not him. The second narrative perspective belongs to another classmate, Jade, who hates Lucinda for all the reasons any overweight, unhappy, smart teen with an abusive drunk for a mother would hate the most popular girl in school and her Norman Rockwell family. Hopefully that voodoo ritual she performed didn't actually work. Third narrator: a cop named Russ, who is obsessed with Cameron's dad, his former partner, not around anymore for some ominous reason which is withheld from the reader for far too long considering it turns out to be irrelevant. Though section titles indicate that the bulk of the action happens over a three-day period, with a denouement weeks later, it feels like much longer. Once you've got a murder mystery plot, you can only spend so much time inside people's heads, going over the same ground. This 24-year-old writer needs to rein in the prose and crank up the plot. We'll be watching.

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June 1, 2017

Newcomer Kukafka breathes new life into a common mystery trope by examining the life and death of 15-year-old Lucinda Hayes through the eyes of three residents of Broomsville, CO. Cameron, the disturbed son of a disgraced cop who abandoned his family, loved Lucinda from afar, often standing vigil outside her bedroom window. Jade, Lucinda's cynical classmate, hated her for stealing her babysitting gig and her best friend. Local cop Russ promised his former partner, Cameron's dad, that he'd look out for Cameron. But what if Cameron killed the girl? In alternating chapters, the characters harbor guilty secrets and reflect on Lucinda's impact on their lives. Mystery fans will most likely figure out whodunit rather quickly, but that's not the main point of this novel. Literary fiction readers will enjoy the occasionally overblown yet often effective language and layered characterizations. Jade's chapters, written in first person, contain "screenplays" (she's a budding writer) that overplay the teen angst angle. VERDICT This smart, fast-paced novel is one that readers will be proud to flaunt beachside or elsewhere. [See Prepub Alert, 3/13/17.]--Liz French, Library Journal

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