Having been very impressed by Fierce Kingdom, I was eager to try another Gin Phillips novel. This one is not quite as thrilling and suspenseful, but the voice is similar, and similarly engaging.
The novel focuses on the relationship between Lucia and Rachel, the former a celebrated female lawyer (this was in 1979, when there were relatively few female lawyers or women in law), and the latter a 14 year old girl, whose mother had approached Lucia for representation in a divorce case, but changed her mind. Rachel however, having accidentally met Lucia when her mother had her wait outside Lucia’s office to be picked up, seems to have attached herself (physically and emotionally) to Lucia who represents for her all that she had never known before, but aspires towards.
Rachel comes from a very conventional kind of family, where gender roles are rigidly proscribed.
My grandmother and aunt followed these rules as well [as Rachel’s mother]. There were others. You never called a boy […] a woman alone was not safe in a liquor store […] You should never swim in the ocean […] never leave your car without checking twice that you locked it. Never sleep on your face because you’ll get wrinkles. Never wear your bathing suit into the front yard to get the mail […] Never go to Kmart in cutoff shorts […] Never stand at the bar in a restaurant […]
p53
Rachel has been coached into these rules, because
Women in my family were afraid of everything
(ibid)
It is little wonder Rachel ends up hero-worshipping Lucia, because
Lucia wasn’t afraid of anything
(ibid)
Lucia, whom a news article called “the pretty little blonde” as the first woman to be appointed a deputy district attorney in Alabama, the first woman to substitute on the bench of the Montgomery County Criminal Court, only one of two women in her class at Cumberland Law School. Lucia lives with her husband Evan, who is a perfect counterfoil to her feisty nature, and her rather moronic but well loved dog, moxie. In the novel, we see Lucia taking on just about anyone, without hesitation, from the neighbour who stole her dog, to the community service officer for pairing Rachel off with a convicted child rapist to do 16 hours of community service for speeding. Nothing seems to daunt or deter Lucia, who seems to know her rights, how to get them, and what is the most effective way of getting things done.
However, given the nature of her job, and her unapologetic nature, Lucia naturally becomes the target for a lot of hate crime, and when someone tries to shoot her in her house, Rachel’s mother decides it is too dangerous for her daughter to associate with Lucia, and bans their contact. Both Lucia and Rachel are deeply unhappy about this, but life goes on. The novel alternates between hearing from Rachel and hearing from Lucia. There is some suspense in the sense that Lucia is constantly targeted (right at the start of her novel, her car is attacked), and the perpetrators are largely unknown, but that really is not the point of the novel. The heart of the novel lies in the building relationship between a teenager who finds a role model, and a high-flying lawyer who somehow is intrigued by the teenager’s character and curiosity, and grows attached to her.
This novel is nowhere near as gripping as Fierce Kingdom, nor as tightly structured. But it was a pleasant read just the same, the kind that shows rather than tells. The voice of Rachel is fairly convincing as that of a teenaged girl who is trying to figure life out, trying to figure herself out, who oscillates between confidence and fear, between knowledge and ignorance. Somehow though, it is a book which has been set up well and could have done so much more, gone in so many interesting directions, but never quite does.
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