A fiercely funny and touching debut novel of a young girl uncovering the truth about her sister’s death.

Fear doesn’t come naturally to Mathilda Savitch. She prefers to look directly at things nobody else can even mention: for example, her beloved older sister’s death. She was pushed in front of a train by a man who is still on the loose, and after a year of searching for clues, Mathilda has come no closer to the truth about Helene’s murder…until she cracks her email password and a whole secret life emerges — one that swiftly draws Mathilda into her sister’s world of clouded motives and strange emotions. If she can find the keys to Helene’s past, she’s sure she can wake her family from their nightmare of grief. But in crossing into that underworld and tracing her sister’s footsteps, she has to risk everything that matters to her.

Mathilda Savitch is a poignant, furiously funny, and tender page-turner from an extraordinary debut novelist.

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Random Notes on Mathilda Savitch by Victor Lodato

I want to be awful. I want to do awful things and why not? The voice of Mathilda Savitch arrived one morning with such force that I do not hesitate to say I felt possessed. I remember staring out the bedroom window, not quite awake, when I began to speak, in an urgent little whisper, the first words of the novel. As a playwright, I’m used to hearing voices, but Mathilda’s was particularly insistent, and wildly seductive. Though her first words may seem a bit ominous, I knew immediately that this was the voice of a child, that the words had no evil in them, but rather issued forth from a character of great willfulness and energy, a fiery soul refusing to be contained. Fairly shaking with excitement, I flew to my desk. Before I knew it I had fallen down the rabbit hole. I spent the next several years recording everything I heard this child say. Truly, I felt more like a secretary than a writer.

I know it must sound odd, even a bit precious, to speak of Mathilda as separate from myself, as some sort of stray radio frequency buzzing in my ear. Perhaps the perception of this “other” is nothing more than a trick my brain plays on itself. Nonetheless, I seem unable to get very far as a writer unless some part of me is convinced that my characters have lives and wills separate from my own. Of course, over time, I began to see that Mathilda and I had a lot in common. When I started the novel, it was almost exactly one year after 9/11. Terrorism hovers in the background of Mathilda’s world as well, and I suppose, by borrowing this child’s voice, I was able to address my own fear and confusion and anger in a very open and innocent way. It was liberating to write in the voice of a child, from the perspective of someone who is still learning the world, and interpreting its complexities for the first time. Interestingly, whereas for me the novel began one year after 9/11, for Mathilda the story begins one year after the death of her beloved older sister. Her parents have become frozen by sadness, and fail to provide the girl with any map or guidance on how to grieve. Mathilda must find her own way across this dark landscape.

This all sounds terribly depressing, but, in fact, what I recall most vividly about the writing process is the way Mathilda made me laugh. When she described a fake fur coat as looking like it was made from guinea pigs, or quipped that a retired teacher who lives next door probably still keeps a red pen stuck in her bra, I knew I’d found a character I would be happy to spend some serious time with.

Also, at the heart of the book is a mystery that Mathilda is attempting to solve, a mystery about her sister’s death. For a long time, I remained in the dark, madly hunting for clues. I was rarely ahead of Mathilda. We edged toward the truth together. It was this detective work, coupled with the exuberance of the voice, that kept this writer writing. And I hope it will be what keeps readers reading.

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“From page one, the outrageous, pitch-perfect voice of this book grabs you up and won’t let go. A bravura performance.”
— Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club and Cherry

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Victor Lodato is the recipient of Guggenheim and National Endownments for the Arts fellowships, and has won numerous awards for his plays, including an award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays. This is his first novel. Lodato divides his time between Tucson, Arizona, and New York.

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