"What happens when the wildness is tamed? What is lost in that erasure?" These are questions Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum ponders in her lustrous first novel, Elita.
This atmospheric mystery takes place on the eponymous Elita Island in Washington State's Puget Sound during the winter of 1951, when "the world is a churning mass of gray sky, gray sea." Lunstrum's evocative, insightful writing captures the nuanced and moody Pacific Northwest landscape and brings to life some very compelling characters, such as a woman with "a face like an apple gone soft with age."
Bernadette Baston, a professor of child development, is summoned to assist in a baffling case: two prison guards have discovered a feral, nonverbal adolescent girl living alone in the inhospitable wilderness. She is given the name Atalanta, after the girl from Greek mythology who was left to die in the woods by her father. Officials work to uncover Atalanta's origins, but the residents of Elita and the neighboring island of Adela remain secretive. Bernadette, who was abandoned by her husband when their daughter was an infant, is no stranger to survival and takes a personal interest in Atalanta.
In Elita, Lunstrum (What We Do with the Wreckage: Stories) explores the challenges women faced during the 1950s, drawing parallels between Atalanta and Bernadette's struggles for autonomy: "How different from a feral child is a grown and educated woman?" As Bernadette contemplates her own life, she realizes that "the entire system of society is set up to stop her from freeing herself." --Grace Rajendran, freelance reviewer