by Kerryn Mayne ★★★★☆
Routine is important to Lenny Marks. She bikes to her job as a schoolteacher at the same time each day, she eats the same things on the same days each week, and she finds comfort in rewatching episodes of Friends that she has seen dozens of times. She lives alone, and has a few acquaintances but no friends. The solitude, regimen and routine are what works for her, though. As author Kerryn Mayne writes, "Lenny's existence was many things: simple, predictable and uneventful. It had taken considerable effort and time to get to this point and she was not planning on disrupting the perfectly good order of things."
The order of things is what keeps Lenny centered, and it keeps any difficult memories at bay. While Lenny has found a way to move through life, she has buried trauma that occasionally threatens to bubble to the surface. When a letter arrives announcing the parole of her stepfather, that old trauma starts knocking more insistently at the door of her mind, and Lenny's well-ordered life begins to come unhinged.
Lenny Marks Gets Away With Murder is Lenny's journey as a barely-adjusted adult trying to navigate the world. First-time author Mayne does a really fine job of peppering in bits of repressed memories for Lenny, creating a breadcrumb trail that gradually reveals the details of the childhood trauma that led Lenny to create the walls within her mind. Lenny's quirkiness, childhood trauma and issues dealing with people sparked memories of Strange Sally Diamond—the character of Sally Diamond in particular—but where that book veered into an incredibly dark place, this one is more palatable. The reader comes to learn more about Lenny as Lenny unpacks her repressed memories, and we see her start to come out of her shell, first through the companionship of a dog and later through some initial friendships.
If I had one gripe, it's actually with the title. I would have preferred something a bit more subtle and a lot less suggestive of the plot of the book. But that's a small nit in what was otherwise a solidly constructed first novel. Mayne creates an authentically troubled person who must deal with her past in order to move into the future, and does so through Sally's interactions with a variety of people: her foster mom, her neighbor, the friendly son of the grocery store owner, the pretty and popular "mean girl" teachers with whom she thinks she wants a friendship, and other teachers who actually prove to be truer friends. Lenny's quirks and directness are not a match for many, but it's an enjoyable journey to embark on as we see her start to find companionship in her solitary life.
Overall, it's good! Worth a read.
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