Book Review: Sing Her Down by Ivy Pochoda

The latest novel from critically acclaimed novelist Ivy Pochoda starts promisingly, in a women’s correctional facility in Arizona. One of our narrators, Kace, has voices in her head. She seems to understand unerringly what’s going on in the world around her, however: courtesy, she claims, of the plaintive dead that only she can hear. Her new cellmate Florida, formerly Florence, has beef with their neighbor Dios. Dios herself seems obsessed with Florida, constantly taunting the latter about taking responsibility for the will to wanton violence that she’s convinced the two women share.

It’s prisonhouse politics as usual, but the outside world has its own surprises in store for these three of our viewpoint characters. A pandemic is spreading, one that won’t leave even these semi-isolated women alone:

Kace is too far gone and fired up. Her voice is sinking into a new register. “You want to kill us all. Shut the fuck up with your coughing. You goddamn fucking murderer. Murderer.”

 

A moment of silence falls. Florida can sense everyone holding their breath, a strangulated tension that catches the block in its death grip and is only punctuated when another attack of coughing arrives.

 

Kace raises both fists to the wall. “There’s murder in your breath. Death inside of you. You keep it in there. You keep it, or I’ll steal your breath for good. Lock it deep inside you. So deep you won’t goddamn need it ever or again.”

When COVID-19 protocols grant both Florida and Dios early release, Florida finds herself living in isolation in a motel, checking in with her parole officer via a cell phone provided to her by the Department of Corrections. When the intermittent food deliveries organized by the state abruptly end, a hungry Florida goes in search of food but finds temptation instead. A ghost bus will take her back to her hometown of Los Angeles for only twenty-five bucks. Acting on impulse, she buys a ticket. Crossing state lines is a parole violation that will send her right back to jail, but all she wants to do is go home and be reunited with her beloved classic Jaguar. She figures she can grab her car and be back in Arizona before her parole officer even notices she’s missing.

But just as the bus is about to leave, Dios shows up. She boards the bus and harrasses Florida, who is well and truly sick of her even before another rider they both know gets on at their next stop. Unable to stand Dios and the new passenger both, Florida takes off before reaching LA, and must figure out how to get back to the place where the one symbol of freedom and hope left to her awaits, or so she has to believe.

Shortly after the women’s illicit flight from Arizona, Detective Lobos of the LAPD is assigned to a new investigation. A passenger on a ghost bus has been murdered. Lobos is having a hard time getting her head in the game, as she’s trying not to jump at ghosts from her personal life herself. When her investigations put her on the trail of Florida and Dios, these personal issues cause her to sympathize with the rage she sees reflected inside her suspects:

Lobos knows how quickly things can slip. How one minute you are staunch in your independence, your confidence, your certainty that you are operating aware of the danger around you but not compromised by it. And the next you are in that danger or, in Florence Baum’s case, perhaps you are that danger.

 

When do you become the thing you’ve kept at bay?

 

When do you become the abused or the abuser?

 

When do you become someone frightened in your own home, rage-numbed and cowering?

 

When do you become the person for whom violence is easily within arm’s reach?

As Kace and her chorus of voices narrate the tale from Arizona, the three other women find themselves gravitating towards a deadly showdown at high noon in a Los Angeles turned into a ghost town by pandemic lockdown restrictions. It’s a modern-day Western that showcases violence by women, saying that it’s okay to be angry without needing a rationalization that diminishes the emotion.

And as someone who grew up constantly being told I was angry—I wasn’t, but it was a convenient label for someone who didn’t believe in going along just to get along—I get that. It’s weird that certain parts of society think that women aren’t or shouldn’t be capable of the same breadths and depths of emotion that men are. But I also think it’s weird that this book explores, mostly through Lobos’ investigations, rich white Florida’s possible motivations for murder while the Latina Dios’ more interesting point of view is sidelined, her descent into sociopathy presented as a given instead of a fascinating subject all on its own. At no point did I understand her obsession with Florida, and I had little sympathy for the idea that any of their impulsively violent actions were somehow justified by an inability to process their society-bred rage otherwise.

Ivy Pochoda writes with style, and often with nuance. Sing Her Down is a successor, of sorts, to These Women, her previous literary thriller that examines female agency and social change through the lens of fiction. Her latest novel is a fast, stylish read that will likely please her fans.