Mathilda Savitch

Mathilda Savitch by Victor Lodato was supposed to be my nice light re-entry into good books after a couple of disappointments. I should have thought more carefully about this since the review on the back reads, in part: a stunning portrait of grief and youthful imagination. As husband Ben put it, youthful imagination can be fun. Grief, not so much.

Still, this is a remarkably good book. I think the most remarkable part is how convincingly Victor Lodato writes from the perspective of an 11 to 13 year old girl. I'm not entirely sure how old Mathilda is. Often she acts 11, but based on some of her activities later in the book, I'm really hoping she's 13 (and that still seems young). Mathilda is a very smart middle school student with a damaged family. Nothing too remarkable there. Her parents are professors who seem to love books more than paying attention to the life around them. Lodato perfectly captures the tedium of an early adolescent's evening at home in a bookish family when you are just desperate for something to happen, anything to break the monotony, but all you get is a fart from your loyal dog. Mathilda observes: Out of nowhere, [Luke] farts and one eye pops open. Oh, what's that? he wonders. Who's there? Some guard dog. he can't tell the difference between a fart and a burglar. And he's too lazy to go investigate.

So this is what passes for entertainment in the Savitch household and you can just feel Mathilda straining to be "awful" as she puts it. She wants to be bad. This seems normal at first--given he age--but then it comes out that her older and adored sister has been killed, brutally shoved in front of a train, and suddenly the passive, bookish parents are revealed as distant and possibly alcoholic. Mathilda is straining not just to break out of the monotony inherent in early adolescence but screaming simply to be heard by her parents. Lodato often has his other characters telling Mathilda to stop yelling, even though the reader (and Mathilda herself) has no idea that she's raised her voice.

Mathilda is not an entirely reliable narrator. Some of her unreliability is due to her age and some is due to denial. Lodato gives her a very convincing voice. For example, when she's explaining why she doesn't like horseback riding--which her mother and sister love(d)--she says it's due to the horses themselves. It was their long heads that worried me. Plus their chompers were also an issue. The way their mouths twitched and moved sideways when they ate. They seemed like maybe they had mental problems. This just seems like the kind of reasoning a girl that age might indulge in.

And Mathilda should know from mental problems, but she's a typically self-centered middle school girl so she saves her character sketches and judgement for the kids around her. Oh, and for her mother whom she, unsurprisingly, currently hates. Mathilda puts a certain amount of energy into torturing her mother, for example, sending her an email from her dead sister's account (talk about being 'awful'). She also attempts to solve her sister's death, partly by contacting the boys Helene was friends with, in one form or another. Mathilda also starts reaching out to the closest boy in her orbit, the boy next door, and her parents are just absent enough to allow this, but Mathilda is not as "awful" as she hopes to be. Something holds her back and it isn't just the tragedy of her sister's death. (The book is set in the near and believable future in which terrorist bombings in this country become almost commonplace. Mathilda ruminates on what drives the terrorists while also being openly irritated that everyone grieves publically for victims of the bombings while she and her family must grieve her sister's death in private)

The book is a bit unsatisfying because we sort of want everything cleared up and instead we get an immature character trying to pull all her own threads together. Mathilda gets the end that she thinks she wants, and even, yes, matures a bit, but Lodato leaves many secrets intact. A very convincing portrait of grief and adolescence,if not altogether satisfying book.