Lost Girls

At bedtime last night I reached around the filing cabinet temporarily (due to some closets Bobby and Julie's boy Thomas is building for us) in front of my the IKEA Billy bookshelf that houses my shelf of books that are not yet read but may get read in the next year or two. I couldn't see what I was grabbing but in my mind I was looking for the next Elizabeth George novel in the Inspector Lynley series.

Instead my hand alighted upon the 2013 Lost Girls by Robert Kolker, the story of the Gilgo Beach murders, a recent addition. So I started reading it. Really good. Thus far he is setting the stage by telling the backstories of the murder victims, each of whom thus far come from hardscrabble backgrounds from small towns and cities around the Northeast. All of them from broken homes, not a stable family situation in sight. Multigenerational broken homes, with worthless fathers drifting in and out for cameos and moms and grandmothers who themselves struggle to keep it together. So many sibblings that it's a blur of names, as impossible to keep track of who is who as people always say Russian novels are.

An America that is, by some miraculous stroke of infinite good luck, largely foreign to me. The state, in the form of schools, foster care systems, food stamps, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, drifts around the margins of the narrative, sometimes disdained by the families out of pride, sometimes eagerly invoked.

I'll keep reading.