Synopsis
A gripping, thought-provoking and intriguing novel about murder, death row and how a life can change in a heartbeat. An irresistible read for those who loved WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN.
At just twenty-five, Noa P. Singleton was confined to death row for the murder of Sarah Dixon. For nearly ten years she has languished there, and in six months she will be executed. It's a fate she has long resigned herself to. But the victim's mother, Marlene, has other plans. With little time remaining, she visits Noa, intent upon invoking a clemency appeal.
What can have prompted this change of heart? And how and why did Noa kill Sarah Dixon? As Noa tells her story, an unapologetic tale of love, anguish and deception emerges that is as unpredictable as its narrator. And two women, linked by murder but with very different goals, wait with growing tension for the final decision on Noa's fate.
Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, June 2013: Smart, quick and disarmingly direct, the eponymous heroine of this stunning debut is a twenty-something college dropout on death row for murder in Pennsylvania. Did Noa P. Singleton actually kill the daughter of the woman now agitating for the state to commute her death sentence? And if so (or even if not) why is Sarah Dixon’s mom, who writes letters to her dead daughter throughout, so anxious for Noa to be cleared? If those were the only questions, this would have been an average thriller. Thanks to very complex characters (particularly Caleb, Noa’s mostly absent father who not coincidentally is sleeping with Sarah) and jagged, jarring prose--a gun sits in a backpack “awkwardly like an adult in a kindergarten class”; Noa declines to occupy the passenger seat on her lawyer’s “virginal ride to salvation”--and a plot that twists and turns but never neatly resolves, it’s genius: a pithy, funny, sad story about truth and lies, and whether we ever really, truly know the difference. --Sara Nelson
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