Phil in SF reviewed Sing Her Down by Ivy Pochoda
What a punch
4 stars
Set in early 2020, two of the three main characters are inmates at an Arizona women's prison. They get an early parole because the prison needs to reduce its population because of the pandemic. Plonked in a cheap motel and told that a charity will feed them and also that they are restricted to their rooms until conditions have been met. But of course they aren't fed, so Florida sets out for Los Angeles to get her car because a car is freedom.
Dios follows, but the two are not friends. Dios' purposes is to instigate Flordia. They disembark early, spend a night breaking & entering, drinking the booze left in a boarded up bar, and cause mayhem in a rural homeless camp.
Lobos is the L.A. cop assigned to investigate a murder when the bus arrives in L.A. carrying the body of a man whose throat has been slit. …
Set in early 2020, two of the three main characters are inmates at an Arizona women's prison. They get an early parole because the prison needs to reduce its population because of the pandemic. Plonked in a cheap motel and told that a charity will feed them and also that they are restricted to their rooms until conditions have been met. But of course they aren't fed, so Florida sets out for Los Angeles to get her car because a car is freedom.
Dios follows, but the two are not friends. Dios' purposes is to instigate Flordia. They disembark early, spend a night breaking & entering, drinking the booze left in a boarded up bar, and cause mayhem in a rural homeless camp.
Lobos is the L.A. cop assigned to investigate a murder when the bus arrives in L.A. carrying the body of a man whose throat has been slit. She zeroes in on the absconding inmates, and investigates all the places where Florida haunted prior to incarceration. At the same time, she's also dealing with the trauma of a soon-to-be ex-husband who is spiraling into mental illness.
Florida has fallen into a life of getting others to be the drivers of what she wants to do. This is the heart of her conflict with Dios, who wants Florida to own up to being an instigator. Dios herself is an instigator. I never really could wrap my head around why Dios cared that much about Florida, but I suspect it would make a lot more sense to me on a re-read. Lobos is constantly looking for her husband among all the homeless camps surrounding the places where Florida might be, frustrating her well-meaning but also casually low-grade sexist new partner. How she interacts with him is a gem of a component to the book. He just can't believe women can be the instigators of violence. To him, womens' violence is the result of mens' behavior.