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    These Women: A Novel
    These Women: A Novel
    These Women: A Novel
    Audiobook9 hours

    These Women: A Novel

    Written by Ivy Pochoda

    Narrated by Bahni Turpin and Frankie Corzo

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    SHORTLISTED FOR THE EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL

    AN LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE, MYSTERY & THRILLER FINALIST * AN INTERNATIONAL THRILLER WRITERS FINALIST, BEST HARDCOVER NOVEL * A MACAVITY BEST MYSTERY NOVEL FINALIST

    A Recommended Book From

    The New York Times Book Review * The Washington Post * Vogue * Entertainment Weekly * Elle * People * Marie Claire * Vulture * The Minneapolis Star-Tribune * LitHub * Crime Reads * PopSugar * AARP * Book Marks * South Florida Sun Sentinel

    From the award-winning author of Wonder Valley and Visitation Street comes a serial killer story like you’ve never seen before—a literary thriller of female empowerment and social change


    In West Adams, a rapidly changing part of South Los Angeles, they’re referred to as “these women.” These women on the corner … These women in the club … These women who won’t stop asking questions … These women who got what they deserved … 

    In her masterful new novel, Ivy Pochoda creates a kaleidoscope of loss, power, and hope featuring five very different women whose lives are steeped in danger and anguish. They’re connected by one man and his deadly obsession, though not all of them know that yet. There’s Dorian, still adrift after her daughter’s murder remains unsolved; Julianna, a young dancer nicknamed Jujubee, who lives hard and fast, resisting anyone trying to slow her down; Essie, a brilliant vice cop who sees a crime pattern emerging where no one else does; Marella, a daring performance artist whose work has long pushed boundaries but now puts her in peril; and Anneke, a quiet woman who has turned a willfully blind eye to those around her for far too long. The careful existence they have built for themselves starts to crumble when two murders rock their neighborhood.

    Written with beauty and grit, tension and grace, These Women is a glorious display of storytelling, a once-in-a-generation novel.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMay 19, 2020
    ISBN9780063005464
    Author

    Ivy Pochoda

    Ivy Pochoda is the author of The Art of Disappearing, Visitation Street, and Wonder Valley, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and winner of the Strand Critics Award. She lives in Los Angeles.

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    Reviews for These Women

    4/5

    164 ratings13 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Incredible, complex, artful, and riveting, start to finish. at 62 i can say this is the best and smartest book I’ve read in many years. Could easily be a college course!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Wonderful book! Please read it. You will have your mind opened. The writing is exquisite and the plot morally resonate. I just can’t say enough about how these characters will stick with you.
    • 5/5
      I really enjoyed this book, the writing is wonderful. I agree with another review that the ending was a little disappointing. It was clear from nearly the start who did it and surprisingly the book summary tips it off. I think that should be rewritten for the benefit a future readers. Also would have preferred for Feelia to be narrated by the same person throughout. It’s disconcerting to have two such different voices narrating the same person. The main narrator for Feelia is excellent, the other narrator did a good job but all voices sounded similar. Overall, the book was very well written and very engaging.
    • 1/5
      This is a very stupid book. It’s not enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      It was okay. I didn't like the ending but until then it was good. It just didn't happen to have any resolution no satisfactory ending. Nothing it was just over.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed Ivy Pochoda’s first novel “Wonder Valley”. Just like her previous novel, this one did not disappoint. Each distinctive perspective comes together to form a gritty and gripping tale of women whose voices often go unheard. They’re women who you might harbor judgments against; women who are well aware of the prejudices that are hurled against them from society and the authorities. I often felt anger on behalf of how the women were treated. There are also wildfires occurring in the background of the story that seemed to me to reflect the ugliness that the women faced. The serial killer may be revealed, but their story is secondhand to the story of the women.
    • 4/5
      This was a gruesome read. The lives of escorts living in LA while being hunted. Good book. I enjoyed it. Good writing.
    • 4/5
      It took a second try at the beginning to get started on this novel. I really enjoyed reading it, an interesting and intriguing story well told. The ending was mildly unsatisfying.
    • 5/5
      A series of murders take place in south Los Angeles. A serial killer should take up more space in the media, but the victims were all either sex workers or living risky lives, the forgettable. The murders stop suddenly and Dorian is sure it's because the final victim was her daughter, who never made it home after a babysitting job, a good girl. Now, years later, the murders start up again and the only cop willing to see what's happening is a disgraced detective, sent down from homicide to vice, someone the other cops won't listen to. This novel is about those women that are deemed disposable. The party girls, cocktail waitresses in strip clubs, women working their corner of a gritty part of Los Angeles that's cut in two by the I-10, a mix of residential neighborhoods, bars, liquor stores, fast food, art galleries and car lots, and equally mixed in who lives there, from the home owners with their security gates and barred windows to the drug addicts and people barely scraping by. Each section is told from the point of view of a woman living there, each section slowly getting closer to discovering who the killer is and who has been protecting him.Pochoda has made a specific neighborhood in Los Angeles an integral part of the story, while doing something more than just writing a well-plotted crime novel. She's interested in the women who go unnoticed, especially after they've gone. This is a good one and one that deserved more attention than it got.
    • 4/5
      I absolutely loved this! Each story was woven together beautifully and each story was as haunting as the rest. I learned so much about what it's like to be a sex worker - more than I ever imagined. Seeing these women's deaths shrugged off by so many people for so long infuriated me.

      The twist was unexpected, which always makes me love a thriller/mystery even more.

      I'll post a longer review on GoodReads, Amazon, as well as my blog once it's up and running.

      Thanks to NetGalley for my copy. All opinions are my own.
    • 4/5
      In your face street grit, don't know if that's a actual genre, but if not it should be. It definitely fits. Five women, two time periods, one man, a destroyer of lives, dead or alive. These are the women that are not listened too, those in the clubs, on street corners. Invisible women that are never taken seriously, those with throwaway lives. So when bodies of these women are found, it is easy to dismiss this as job risk. I mean what do you expect? They live in the shadows, they know the danger. Don't they?I love this author, her books are so well done. Shock value, she doesn't mince words, gives it to the reader as it really is. Gritty and real. Her books are page turners, and her characters, dialogue both realistic. She doesn't let you look away. Makes one see the downtrodden, open ones eyes to the fact that these women are there. They have lives, hopes, dreams just as we do, but for whatever reason they are where they are. This doesn't make them less worthy, less believable. Everyone has value and no one has the right to take that away.
    • 5/5
      These women: they’re disposable. They’re the crazies, the prostitutes, the people who you don’t really listen to, or if you do, you don’t believe what they say because these women, they live fast, they take risks, they go off the deep end, and when some john kills one of them, well, what do you expect? It happens.Ivy Pochoda’s novel about these women gives us their distinct and memorable voices, starting with Feelia in 1999, telling an unresponsive hospital roommate, how she got her throat cut when she wasn’t even working, all because she was enjoying the evening, thinking about how nice the South Central neighborhood was compared to her childhood home, Little Rock. Not on guard. Then we meet Dorian in 2014, a white woman who’d married a black man, running a fried fish shop while keeping an eye on the women who work the streets, trying to keep them safe. Her own daughter had been murdered, the last victim in a string of unsolved killings. Someone is leaving dead hummingbirds at her shop, so many she has collected two shoeboxes full, a cryptic message of dead, fragile beauty. It only tells the police she’s one of those women, imagining things. She holds conversations in her head with another mother who lost a child, one who is on the news clamoring for justice after the police officers who killed him were acquitted, gathering a storm of public rage and grief that hangs in the air like the ash and smoke from the fires burning in the hills above the city. Yet Dorian is the only one who notices the murders of women in the neighborhood have started again. Something made her daughter’s killer stop fifteen years ago. But when one of the women who stops regularly by Dorian’s restaurant has her throat slit, she knows it’s happening again.Julianna, who goes by Jujubee when she’s working, is another of this Greek chorus of angry, grieving women. She was once a little girl, looked after by Dorian’s daughter, but now she’s working in a bar with a back room, just one step up from streets where girls get killed. She lives with her phone in her hand. The women she lives with assume she’s taking selfies, but it’s a ruse to take photos of the women around her. She only realizes, after seeing promotional banners for an exhibit, that what she does with her phone is art that has the power to show the beauty and terror of a world most people overlook. Another story belongs to her neighbor, Marella, a white girl educated at a boarding school who creates performance art about violence against women’s bodies, violence she personally craves, and there’s also Essie, a detective who was bounced from homicide to vice after being involved in a fatal accident, one covered up by police that still derailed her career. As a prank, Feelia is sent to her desk to report, as she so often does, that some white woman is stalking her, a story nobody believes until Essie hears it and begins to put things together. It may sound challenging to keep all of these women straight, but they are drawn with such skill they are not only distinct, they are unforgettable.THESE WOMEN is a brilliant and ambitious novel that weaves together strands of the zeitgeist – burning hillsides, internet-fueled protests against police violence, and women’s #metoo anger erupting after being ignored and silenced. It’s an artful meditation about the relationship of art and violence and how we are bound together by slender threads of fear and love. It’s a solid and engrossing mystery that has all the required elements: strong characters, a vivid sense of place, growing tension, all heightened by giving these women such memorable, indelible voices. It’s the kind of crime fiction that sees in everyday violence larger crimes and demands more than simple justice.(I don't usually give stars - reading is such a personal, idiosyncratic experience - but since this book wasn't rating very high I added my five-star rave. It's not for everyone, but I found it very, very good.)
    • 3/5
      Can we talk about marketing? Because lately I find it's totally missing the mark, like with this book, and the misdirection can be a problem for readers.Here's the short marketing blurb: "...a serial killer story like you’ve never seen before—a literary thriller of female empowerment and social change." The first half of that sentence is mostly correct, though also misleading. The serial killer is absolutely not the focus of this story, but more the background noise driving the anger, and occasionally the peripheral fear, of the women whose stories are told here."Literary" perfectly fits the writing style, but "thriller" is a definite miss on genre. These Women is crime drama, or literary drama, but not a thriller. Pacing is extremely slow. We have a lot of narrating characters, all female, living hard lives on city streets. We deep-dive into their separate stories, and we only see a convergence of these women's lives toward the end.Then the last part of that marketing blurb, "female empowerment and social change," led me to expect this book to feature strong women fighting for change. What we have is women beaten down by the system: prostitutes, women of color facing systemic racism, and women ignored. Yes, some of these women show strength in their everyday struggles for survival, but I wouldn't call that female empowerment, and, rather than "social change," I see the same old story of women suppressed, mistreated, and cast aside. One of the characters' persistence in hounding the police might be considered a call for social change, though that's a stretch.Despite all that, expectations didn't kill my enjoyment. I did like the book, though I didn't love it. The writing is dark and gritty and honest, but I found the content repetitive and too disconnected. I did love the last quarter, when we finally see the connection with all these women, and the serial killer is pulled out of the shadows.*I received a review copy from the publisher, via NetGalley.*