Tomato Girl, By Jayne Pupek. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2008. $23.95. ISBN: 978-1-56512-472-1.

It’s Holy Week in 1969 in rural Virginia. Ellie is a young girl living with her deeply troubled mother (“troubled” as in “keeps her prematurely stillborn son in a jar and becomes more and more upset when it refuses to breast feed”). Ellie’s father, the only person who can rein Ellie’s mom in, has just run off with the Tomato Girl, a local farmer, and Ellie’s mom is losing her already tenuous grasp on reality. Only Ellie can help her.

This is not a story about a sassy southern belle overcoming slight adversity in order to date again. This is a story about well-meaning people in a difficult situation, who do the best they can for as long as they can, until they just can’t anymore.

Pupek’s prose flows beautifully, and the struggles of these characters are gripping and pitch-perfect. At times, it is difficult to pinpoint Ellie's age; she seems younger than she is supposed to be. Yet, she has to face problems which the adults around her often can't or won’t handle. Ellie’s father describes Ellie’s mother as “a lily caught in a hurricane” and explains to Ellie that it’s their job to be the calm air around her, which means that all of their needs have to be set aside. Yet, Ellie’s father is able to run off with the Tomato Girl, Ellie’s mother is able to escape into her mind, but Ellie is left holding the bag. Her biggest concerns are not “does Billy like me” but rather “did my daddy give my mommy too many horse tranquilizers when he drugged her to make her stop screaming”.

The only real misstep in the novel is the introduction of “Clara”, a local African American “seer” who guides Ellie through the last act of the novel. Aside from the familiarity of such a character, she simply lacks weight on the page. Pupek has taken great pains to make many of the other characters deeply layered, flawed individuals, so that there are no easily defined “villains” or “heroes”; we understand why Ellie’s father would have a straying eye, why the Tomato Girl, herself, is open to such advances. Even the daughter of the know-it-all church lady next door is sufficiently fleshed out to make her more than a plot device, and the entire impetus of the novel occurs when Ellie refuses to fetch her mom an onion, which leads to her mom falling down the stairs. Ellie, likewise, is (somewhat understandably) negligent towards her pets, so that even this horribly trapped little girl is flawed.

With Clara, Pupek seems to have abandoned the promise of the aforementioned darker elements in favor of a more palatable ending. And yet, Pupek’s ending certainly isn’t happy. It holds promise, which is all we can realistically ask after everything Ellie goes through (if Pupek had chosen to end with Ellie going to prom with the high school quarterback, for example, I’d have thrown the book across the room on principle).

When considering stories narrated by little girls in peril, one can't help but think of the two extremes: Mitch Cullin's beautiful and tragic Tideland, or some “Nancy Drew”-esque children’s story. The darker aspects of Pupek’s novel keep it from being entirely accessible to younger readers, but Pupek also rarely achieves the surreal inventiveness of Cullin, who dives into the head of his (younger than Pupek’s) little-girl-lost narrator, showing the world almost completely through her kid-eyes. Pupek instead employs a more straightforward and accessible style. Her depictions of Ellie’s mother’s mental illness ring true, and Ellie’s struggles are heartbreaking.

This is a promising debut novel from an exceptional poet. I look forward to reading her next one, whenever that may be.

-Reviewed by CL Bledsoe