Leda and the Swan

March 15, 2021
A troubled sorority girl has no memory of what happened the night a classmate went missing--only that she might have been the last person to see her. Leda, a third-year college student at an unnamed Big U somewhere in America, can't piece together most of what happened the night her classmate Charlotte Mask disappeared. They'd spoken briefly the night it happened, at the Gamma Kappa Omega Halloween party; outside, Leda had watched Charlotte get into a car and drive away. Otherwise, the evening is a blur. This, in itself, is not unusual: "For Leda, the pursuit of alcohol was basically an extracurricular activity," an attempt, along with sex, to stave off the looming threat of loneliness that has emerged since her mother's death her senior year of high school. Avoiding loneliness, we are told, is the reason she does most things, including belonging to the otherwise-insufferable sorority that is at the center of her life. But she can't shake the feeling that she may know something, may have seen something. All she knows for sure is that she was with Ian, a handsome senior, that she'd spoken to Charlotte, that her lip is bleeding, that the condom she'd been carrying is gone. She can't remember if she slept with Ian--probably?--and can't exactly figure out her visceral discomfort with him now--hadn't she wanted to?--but she has the sense that something sinister has happened; the rest of the novel is her quest to figure out what. While the plot, simultaneously convoluted and clich�d, deflates under the weight of the buildup, the novel is a master class in atmosphere, so intoxicatingly ominous you could forgive the details. A lonely, brooding page-turner about agency, identity, and consent.

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April 1, 2021
In her third year at a college near the rural county where she grew up with her mom, who died three years ago, Leda lives with her sorority sisters in the Psi Delta house. At parties on Halloween night, Leda is photographed by a girl dressed as a swan, and flirts with her crush, Ian. Getting some air, she talks to the swan girl, Charlotte, and watches her get into someone's car. Two days later, Leda emerges from an epic hangover and Charlotte is officially missing. With some overlong passages, Caritj's debut doesn't quite earn the suspense it seems to be aiming for, but it's long on atmosphere, a spooky-bucolic campus setting, and the strong character-building of its tough, guarded protagonist. Leda's pretty sure she went home with Ian on Halloween, but she becomes uneasy when she acknowledges that her blackout means she wasn't able to give consent, and learns that Ian used to date Charlotte, with whom Leda grows increasingly obsessed. Like the myth of its title, Caritj's novel entangles the vulnerability and agency of young, mortal women.

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