Solitaria

Afro-Brazilian novelist Cruz makes her English-language debut with a taut and deeply felt tale of class tension. It’s told in three parts, beginning with Mabel Pereira da Silva, 13, who works with her mother, Eunice, as a live-in maid for Ms. Lúcia’s family in a luxury high-rise. On one of Mabel’s first days there, Ms. Lúcia’s toddler nephew nearly drowns in the pool and the blame falls on an underage nanny employed by the child’s mother. The incident plants the seeds of discontent in Mabel: at the ways the rich in her unnamed Brazilian city are allowed to be careless, perpetual children while the poor are denied any childhood at all. But when a teenage pregnancy threatens Mabel’s dreams of medical school, it’s Lúcia who helps her get an abortion. In the novel’s second part, Eunice struggles to keep her family together. Thanks to Mabel’s influence, she chooses dignity and leaves Lúcia and her alcoholic husband to make a better life for herself. However, when Mabel needs money for textbooks and Lúcia offers her a substantial sum for one day of work, she accepts, only to witness yet another tragedy born of carelessness. As the truth comes out, the novel builds to a fiery anthem against injustice. This bildungsroman has plenty of bite. (Aug.)