Katie V

For four years, I lived in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. In the morning, I'd run through the neighborhood as the city's inhabitants--housed and homeless--began to stir. On the weekends, I'd run through Golden Gate Park, through many of the places this book's main character, Maddy, sleeps at night and spends time in during the day. I was fully aware of how sinister these lushly overgrown trails could feel at night. Going to and from work and wandering the neighborhood on the weekends, I saw the mostly white, mostly young people sitting on the streets, many of them unwell, strung out, or both.

Maddy's story provides a fuller picture of that aspect of my experience, delving into the inner world of one of those people and depicting her day-to-day life, so different from what I experienced as a housed person in San Francisco. Seligman's portrayal of Maddy's life was gripping, keeping me reading for hours and hanging on every word. The characters were vivid, the glimpse into the neighborhood homeless shelter and the park itself full and clear.

And the book's plot, which weaves Maddy's story around the central mystery of what compelled the book's villain to murder another young white person in a secluded area of the park, is compelling. We wonder, as do the dead young man's parents, what his life was like on the streets of San Francisco and how he ended up meeting a tragic end. We get hints, but we never solve the mystery, and Maddy lives in fear of the killer.

The one thing I struggled with was the fact that the book's gaze lies on white characters and people. When I first moved to San Francisco, I assumed the face of homelessness was white--the youth on the streets and in the park; the older white men in wheelchairs, like the character Jax. However, when I volunteered in the family shelter that used to be in the Haight and moved to the Tenderloin in the early 2000s, I discovered that most of the homeless families I was working with were people of color. I learned about those families and their lives and discovered a much vaster world of homelessness than I had previously understood. As I read this book, because of my personal experience, I found myself wishing to see those families in the story. Perhaps Seligman or another writer--maybe one of those kids, if at all possible--will tell those stories, which also need to be seen and understood.

Seligman is a master of character development and setting. I felt like I was walking down Haight Street with Maddy and sitting in hidden groves in Golden Gate Park. And I was rooting for Maddy to get housed and change the trajectory of her life. She had good people rooting for her--something so many unhoused people lack--but she was just unreliable enough as a narrator that I was left hoping for her life to change but not sure that it would. And that was enough for me. Seligman's accomplishment in this book, I feel, was to draw me into the story so thoroughly that I was willing to accept Maddy's choices--and, in my real life in the real world, to continue to support services for the homeless and educate myself about the realities of homelessness.

Miss Austen begins in the springtime, and the novel is infused with the positive energy of spring's possibility. An unflinching look at the constraints around women's lives in the 1700s and 1800s, the novel shows how bright, creative women like Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra navigated within those gender limitations and ultimately created space for themselves to live lives of their choosing. Told from Cassandra Austen's perspective, the book moves back and forth in time, bringing to life Cassandra's rich memories of her creative, boisterous family, especially her beloved sister Jane, and then returning to Cassandra's present, after Jane has passed away and Cassandra has embarked on a mission to protect Jane's legacy. This delightful book offers historical detail, glimpses into Austen's characters and novels, immersive depictions of the landscapes in which the Austens lived, star-crossed romance, and ultimately the satisfaction of women's lives well lived. I enjoyed it immensely, and looked forward to picking it up every evening.