The Sharp Time (review)

Eighteen-year-old Sandinista struggles to finish her senior year following the death of her mother in September. When a sadistic teacher, Mrs. Bennett, takes out her own grief over the death of her husband on the vulnerable girl, Sandinista leaves school and gets a job at Pale Circus, a vintage clothes store with an eccentric owner and a kind co-worker named Bradley. She can't stop thinking about Mrs. Bennett, though, and the awful way she treated not only Sandinista but also Alecia, a special-needs girl who has been mainstreamed into Mrs. Bennett's class. Sandinista's thoughts become increasingly obsessive and increasingly violent, until Bradley invites her into his confidence and they share their mutual pain. O'Connell's prose is lyrical enough to be poetry, as Sandinista processes her anger and sadness both in conscious ways, through memories of her mother, and unconscious ones, where she berates herself for her passivity in the face of Mrs. Bennett's abuse of Alecia, which relates obliquely to her inability to bring her mother back. The solutions to her problems come in small moments of grace from various quarters—each of the storeowners on the street near Pale Circus has his or her own story to tell and comfort to offer, as do the monks who live nearby, and especially Bradley, whose gentle acceptance brings Sandinista back from what could have been a horribly destructive act. Layers of metaphor, lush prose, and rich imagery compose an atmospheric portrait of a girl surviving wrenching grief and coming through to the other side with her own strength to offer someone in need.