A Year in Reading: Monica West
I have been an avid reader all my life, ever since I learned how to blend syllables and hold board books. Even before that, when I was read to, the world that existed on the page was always a world that I wanted to return to. It was my escape, my comfort, my safety net, my home. I never imagined that reading would one day become my only way of connecting to the world that I was often prohibited from entering in 2020 and 2021.
It seems fortuitous that I began 2021 by reading a close friend’s debut novel—by . It was a book that I had been blown away by in workshop years prior, so knowing that its pitch-perfect polyphony of voices would be published in just a few months reminded me that there would soon be something brilliant in a world that was in desperate need of goodness and beauty. On the heels of Walton’s extraordinary debut, I read ’s and found myself transported to a landscape of adolescence, wonder, and obsession situated in the starkness of northern Minnesota—a setting whose iciness amplifies the terror in Fridlund’s fictional world. Fridlund’s premise reminded me about how fragile girlhood is, about the tenuousness of growing up seeking external validation that is often disappointing when you finally receive it.
