A Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Debutiful, Oprah Daily, and Vogue • A Most Anticipated Book of Spring 2024 by the New York Times
“Magnetic . . . The ennui of small-town life is perfectly captured in the slice-of-life vignettes, which coalesce into a riveting set of Rashomon-style retellings. Grabowski shows immense promise.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“I am a big fan of Women and Children First . . . Alina Grabowski is an astute and limber narrative artist and I could read her prose all day long and never grow weary.” —Lorrie Moore, author of A Gate at the Stairs
“In Grabowski’s craftily constructed and deeply moving debut, ten girls and women in a decaying coastal Massachusetts tourist town respond to the death of a teenager at a house party . . . Grabowski so deftly depicts the web of relations in this oppressively tight-knit community that it becomes evident how life changes for one character reverberate even for those who would seem outside her sphere of influence.” —Booklist, starred review
“Wow wow wow! Alina Grabowski’s original and brilliantly written novel, Women and Children First, tells the story of a teenager named Lucy Anderson, who dies at a high school house party, through the lens of ten different women narrators—from her best friend to her principal to her mother. I was dazzled by the author’s skill and emotional depth.” —Elin Hilderbrand, author of The Five-Star Weekend and The Perfect Couple
“Girls and women inflict damage on each other by being too close and not recognizing their own agency and power, and also because disrupting systems of male privilege is difficult. Grabowski’s exploration of all these ideas makes for a brilliant novel. A smart, propulsive novel attentive to the ways community can fall short.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Reading Women and Children First is like encountering the best kind of puzzle: each of its pieces is a small marvel, elegant and finely wrought. But then, the chapters snap together in the most satisfying way, creating a full picture that is as sweeping as it is nuanced. Here are friends and foes, past resentments and future hopes, all the mess and beauty of a complicated, compelling community. You won’t be able to put it down until the puzzle is complete.” —Emily Nemens, author of The Cactus League
“While a young woman’s violent death sounds like the setup for a murder mystery story, in Grabowki’s deft hands, it becomes something richer and more surprising: an opportunity to capture the people left in her wake at their most honest, flawed, and insightful. Once you get into these women’s heads, they will never get out of yours.” —Oprah Daily
“Alina Grabowski is a writer of startling wisdom and deep humanity, and Women and Children First reads like a shimmering kaleidoscope of grief and longing, a magic lantern casting spectral illumination across dark surfaces of loss. Its pages smell like watermelon body lotion and low tide and fresh snow; they sing with moments of insight that took my breath away. Every voice is so compelling that I never wanted to leave it, but each new voice immediately seduced me—brought me into its own powerful portrait of intimacy and yearning, the cruelties and compassions that compose an adolescence, or a marriage. Together, these voices collectively summon the chorus of a ruptured community, gesturing toward those spiderwebs of attachment and betrayal that unmake us, and those moments of grace that ambush and rearrange us all.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and The Gin Closet
“Alina Grabowski’s Women and Children First (SJP Lit) is a novel built from interlocking stories, each chapter told from the perspective of a different woman living in a down-at-the-heels coastal New England town. In less capable hands, such rapid shifts might have a disorienting effect, but the book spins an entrancing web, the stories channeling the spirit of Mary Gaitskill and subtly building to reveal more and more about the town’s inhabitants. They include . . . the mother of a local teen who has died an untimely death. The cause of that death is the nominal mystery of Women and Children First, but the book is more about the secrets we keep and the lies we tell to remain hidden from one another.” —Vogue (Most Anticipated Book of Spring 2024)
“Women and Children First so deftly captures the keen insight and angst of youth, girlhood, and womanhood. The characters here are complex and written with such intensity and clarity. The setting, too, is rendered in vivid, blue-hued color. This is a stunning, intricate, and multi-faceted debut from a writer whose long career I can't wait to follow!” —Kelsey Norris, author of House Gone Quiet
“The rare book that lives up to such high-flying hype . . . a profoundly moving story. . . . Within the narrative, Grabowski masterfully explores the complexity of female friendships: their power to enrich, to sustain and to scar. . . . Grabowski has created a novel that illuminates these very human ties; how even through tragedy they can shift and strengthen, told by female characters who will stay with you long after you rest this book on a shelf.” —WBUR
“Arresting and assured . . . a gorgeously attentive writer.” —Boston Globe
“[A] original, deeply affecting debut novel about complex women and the community they carry.” —Real Simple
“Gorgeous and lush, heartbreaking and cruel, the story of this complicated community and the women who are trying to survive in it will stick with you, hauntingly present long after as young Lucy herself.” —The Brooklyn Rail
“How often do you finish a novel, only to find yourself flipping back to the first page and thinking, I really ought to start that all over again? . . . Set in a struggling New England town, the novel unfolds through interlocking stories—something like Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge or Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad . . . a rich and textured book, with shades not only of those female authors, but also Mary Gaitskill or Lorrie Moore, through its investigation into female agency, power, and vulnerability.” —Vogue.com
“A striking debut from a brilliant new voice. Alina Grabowski perfectly inhabits her characters, shining a light on the multidimensionality of both grief and adolescence with great humor and insight.” —Sarah Jessica Parker, SJP Lit
★ 2024-02-17
A debut novel set in Nashquitten, Massachusetts, a fictional seaside town.
A teenager named Lucy Anderson dies under mysterious circumstances at a party after a video clip of her having a seizure circulates on social media. Grabowski’s novel traces a constellation of relationships, some intimate and others incidental, between Lucy and 10 girls and women who narrate the stories of their lives. Jane, who attends the local public high school with Lucy, is having an affair with her math teacher and caring for her mother, who suffers from a mysterious chronic illness. Natalie has managed to escape her hometown but ends up working for the tyrannical founder of a San Francisco startup, a decision she begins to regret when she returns home to care for her sick mother. Mona, Natalie’s best friend and old rival who told her to take the job, crosses paths with two of the girls who witnessed Lucy’s accident. Though Mona knows one of them and can tell they’re both in trouble, she chooses to do nothing. “[This] is the danger of girls,” Mona thinks. “They look like deer when, really, they’re wolves.” This comment could just as easily describe Mona and many of the novel’s female protagonists. Women suffer at the hands of men—besides the lascivious math teacher, there’s also a coach who’s sexually assaulting students—but they also betray each other. That’s the case with Maureen, president of the high school PTA. She’s a do-gooder who is trying to organize a memorial for Lucy, but she also has made a huge moral compromise to protect her daughter, who did something cruel. Each of the book’s first-person sections takes its time, fully immersing us in the dreams of its narrator and how those dreams have been frustrated. Girls and women inflict damage on each other by being too close and not recognizing their own agency and power, and also because disrupting systems of male privilege is difficult. Grabowski’s exploration of all these ideas makes for a brilliant novel.
A smart, propulsive novel attentive to the ways community can fall short.
