Аннотация

A gripping literary puzzle that unwinds the private lives of ten women as they confront tragedy in a small Massachusetts town.
Nashquitten, MA, is a decaying coastal enclave that not even tourist season can revive, full of locals who have run the town's industries for generations. When a young woman dies at a house party, the circumstances around her death suspiciously unclear, the tight-knit community is shaken. As a mother grieves her daughter, a teacher her student, a best friend her confidante, the events around the tragedy become a lightning rod: blame is cast, secrets are buried deeper...

"The title of Alina Grabowski’s arresting and assured debut, “Women and Children First,” is the traditional maritime code for who to save in a shipwreck. It also evokes the paradox of the teenage girls at the novel’s heart, who are at once children and women, endlessly in peril while imperiling themselves and others, desperately trying to save themselves in a community and world that should keep them safe but continuously threatens them.
The book’s two parts, “Pre” and “Post,” balance on the fulcrum of its central event: the death of Lucy Anderson at a high school party in the woods of Nashquitten, a South Shore town that is a dead ringer for Scituate, where Grabowski grew up. These two parts comprise 10 chapters, each narrated by a girl or woman connected to Lucy, some intimately (her best friend, Sophia, and mother, Brynn), others tenuously (Maureen, the head of the Nashquitten High School PTA; Mona, the roommate of Lucy’s college counselor; Natalie, an alum who encounters Lucy’s parents in the ER the night she dies).
" — The Boston Globe
"While a young woman's violent death sounds like the setup for a murder mystery story, in Grabowski's deft hands, it becomes something richer and more surprising: an opportunity to capture the people left in her wake at their most honest, flawed, and insightful. Once you get into these women's heads, they will never get out of yours."
— Oprah Daily