The Girl Below
Bianca Zander

William Morrow Paperbacks
June 19, 2012 / 978-0062108166
Literary
Amazon

Reviewed by Jan Fields

In The Girl Below, Suki is a woman frozen in adolescence and looking for her own adulthood. She has vaguely disturbing memories of her childhood in England, but after a number of unsatisfying years in New Zealand, she decides to test the theory that you can't go home again.

Once in Britain, Suki's tale becomes a kind of funhouse mirror "coming of age" story. Things begin to happen to her -- maybe supernatural, maybe just hallucinations from
a very troubled girl -- but definitely unsettling events. And in her adolescent haze, Suki mostly responds to these things with whining and inactivity. Though that makes for incredibly realistic characterization, it also leads to a slow moving book with a truly unlikable main character.

Though the prose is lovely and literary, the pace is so glacial that it's a challenging book to stick with. The magical realism elements nudge this book toward fantasy, but don't expect any of the normal fantasy plotting and characterization -- The Girl Below has the aimless feel of literary fiction, as well as the skillful use of mood that typifies many successful literary novels. The reader is mainly carried along by the beauty of the prose itself, the mood of many of the scenes, and by a mild curiosity to determine if Suki is really haunted or just delusional.