A Room Away from the Wolves by Nova Ren Suma (review)

Bina is supposed to be going into exile (well, being taken in by friends) to give her warring family (really her bullying stepsisters) a breather, but instead Bina makes a break for it, heading to Manhattan. There she seeks out and finds Catherine House, the old-fashioned boarding house her mother stayed at in her youth, and she's welcomed as a legacy and given a tiny room. She's thrilled at this connection with the mother she loved, the mother who had possibilities beyond merely acceding to the man in her life, and she enjoys her budding friendship with willful fellow resident Monet. Catherine House is strange, though, in ways that Bina finds increasingly disturbing: the frantic devotion of the other young women there to the house's benefactress, Catherine de Barra, and the legends around her death; the opal ring that belonged to Bina's mother and now seems connected to Catherine; and the seeming inability of its inhabitants to leave. This is Muriel Spark's great boarding-house novel The Girls of Slender Means turned to creepy gothic, and turned to it very well indeed. Suma's writing is taut, potent, and enticing as she establishes Bina's vulnerability and crafts the oppressive, plush, and enigmatic world of Catherine House. As with her previous books, however, the situation is a stage for girls in liminal or marginalized states to play out their emotional transitions, so Bina's family drama and her mother's painful distancing are a keen and anxious harmonic line. The book's structure, with an opening scene set after Bina has been at Catherine House for a month, primes readers to be alert to strangeness but leaves twists in store for them, and there's plenty of room for discussion afterward about the implications.