The back-and-forth narrative between Paloma’s childhood at the orphanage and her fraught, haunted adulthood in San Francisco nearly two decades later is a page-turner, albeit one in which some surprises mesh better than others.Īn uneven debut that nevertheless offers twists a-plenty.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing.
Woven through with incisive references to Wuthering Heights, Little Women, Oliver Twist, Enid Blyton, The Sound of Music, and, above all, the lyrics to “Que Sera Sera,” the novel often has a dreamlike quality (read: nightmarish) that heightens its sometimes-erratic quality of psychological suspense. Soon, along with interactions with her therapist, Nina, she’s juggling the police, nosy neighbors, a potential stalker, and a friendly fellow Sri Lankan named Saman. Then she comes home to find her roommate dead-murdered, in fact. Eighteen years later, living in San Francisco, Paloma is struggling: She drinks too much, feels abandoned by her adoptive parents, makes money from a slightly sordid source, and is convinced she’s being haunted by the same ghost that her fellow residents believed haunted the orphanage. That momentous event takes her away from the more dire elements of orphanage life-especially out of the clutches of the nasty Sister Cynthia-but it also means leaving her best friend, Lihini.
Paloma Evans, “the luckiest girl in the whole wide world”-or at least at the Little Miracles Girls’ Home-is adopted by do-gooding philanthropists Mr. A Bay Area woman is plagued by memories of a Sri Lankan orphanage in this psychological thriller.
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