Marilou Is Everywhere
Fourteen-year-old Cindy and her two older brothers live in rural Pennsylvania, in a house with occasional electricity, two fierce dogs, one book, and a mother who comes and goes for months at a time. Deprived of adult supervision, the siblings rely on one another for nourishment of all kinds. As Cindy's brothers take on new responsibilities for her care, the shadow of danger looms larger and the status quo no longer seems tolerable.
So when a glamorous teen from a more affluent, cultured home goes missing, Cindy escapes her own family's poverty and slips into the missing teen's life. As Jude Vanderjohn, Cindy is suddenly surrounded by books and art, by new foods and traditions, and most important, by a startling sense of possibility. In her borrowed life she also finds herself accepting the confused love of a mother who is constitutionally incapable of grasping what has happened to her real daughter. As Cindy experiences overwhelming maternal love for the first time, she must reckon with her own deceits and, in the process, learn what it means to be a daughter, a sister, and a neighbor.
Marilou Is Everywhere is a powerful, propulsive portrait of an overlooked girl who finds for the first time that her choices matter.
Author: Sarah Elaine Smith | Publisher: Riverhead
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Rating: 5 / 5
“My mother was the kind who would be very offended if you called her a racist. She talked about it all sideways at best. The most you could get out of her was: I don’t approve. And she trusted she did not need to speak any further on the subject. As, generally, she did not. Whoever she was talking to usually knew exactly what she meant. Her disapproval met in the air with the disapproval of whoever she was talking to, and the two silent moods married and had their own life, in the air all over us, in the water, in the mind. That was the trick to it, never having to say what you actually meant. Nothing is real if you don’t have to say it.”
If you read literary fiction in any capacity, if you love when words sing like music, if you read to feel, then Marilou Is Everywhere is not to be missed. I read it on strong recommendation from my friend Hunter (@shelfbyshelf), whose opinion I trust very much. And I’m so incredibly glad I did.
The story takes place in a very small, very rural town where one day, a girl went missing. She stopped on the way home from a camping trip to get an emergency car repair, and she vanished. Meanwhile, Cindy (our narrator) and her brothers are living at home without a mother (again). After Jude goes missing, Cindy’s oldest brother is never there, and her other brother is beginning to make her more than a little uncomfortable in the way he looks at her. So she (almost) accidentally slips into the life Jude left behind. Until she can’t anymore.
There is just so much to unpack from this story. There’s the need for love and belonging, there’s the sense of self, there’s alcoholism, there’s racism, there’s classism, there’s guilt and family and inner strength and reckoning.
In this book, Sarah Elaine Smith presents us with a masterclass in writing — particularly in writing metaphor. She holds MFAs in both fiction and poetry, which makes her a true gift to the world. I have never imagined metaphors like those she writes — they are almost nonsensical, except that you feel them in your bones and they make all the sense in the world.
And so what she’s able to do with Cindy as a character, and with the characters of everyone else seen through Cindy’s eyes, is incredible. Cindy is both her own person and a mirror held up to the reader, making you question who you are and what choices you’ve made in your own life. And yet this is not at the expense of plot; I turned every page more than a little eager to see how everything would resolve.
And the book’s final two sentences? They slayed me. Perfection.
“In every switch and ion there is a girl smoking her first idiot cigarette under a corrugated tin roof and etching a difference into the air. Try to find a jukebox free of the sentiment. Try to find a waterfall that isn’t made of this. You’ll die looking. I promise. The search party will quit and go home.”