Mice 1961

Two orphaned sisters, Jody and Mice—near adults, half-infantile—live in a fairly specific place: Miami, in the springtime of 1961. But in Levine's telling they also live in a landscape of blocky, odd words. She's the sort of storyteller who seems to pause in almost every sentence to wonder at the strangeness of the language we live through, and that makes reading Mice 1961 fun. (Its off-kilter style kept me thinking it was one of those novels that limits itself by removing one of the letters, but I checked: all 26 are there.) As for Jody and Mice (and for Girtle, their odd housekeeper/narrator, who "watched the half sisters near-always") it can take some time in this weird landscape to arrange themselves for action, but when one finally decides to go, she goes!