Ruins, Child

Scodallero’s mesmerizing and challenging debut novel (after the story collection Some of Them Will Carry Me) focuses on a film screening in a near-future intentional community of women. The group members have found deep meaning from their common experiences as working-class mothers, caregivers, homemakers, and lovers, and the film depicts six of them. Told in sections labeled “the film,” “the text” and “the sound,” the scenes that make up this hybrid of fiction, essay, and verse are intimate in scale yet sociopolitically resonant: “The community is made up of predominantly black people... it’s a place we’ve created for ourselves, okay? Or a place we were forced into and have reimagined.” Often, passages are written like recitations of a spell. The novel has little by way of plot, but much to offer in terms of beauty. For readers willing to surrender to the sway and creep of Scodallero’s prose, it can feel much like watching an art house film, where, as one of the novel’s characters puts it, “we are lost in the potential of this scene.” The result is an arresting work by a writer unbound by constraints of the expected. (Mar.)