How to order the universe A novel

M is a seven-year-old girl living in Chile with her distant mother and salesman father. She has always been attracted to order, preoccupied with the way items fit together and how people fall in love with them. When her father, D, begins bringing her on his trips to sell Kramp hardware--the finest in the land--M becomes enamored of the process of sales. She deviates from school and learns the trade, mixing with the men who try to one-up each other in bars and fabricate expenses to get more cash out of their companies. M becomes D's secret weapon, closing the sale every time. But as father and daughter grow closer, D begins to forget that his daughter is a child, and their relationship unravels as quickly as it intensified. Ferrada, an award-winning journalist and author of children's books, presents an adult debut as haunting as it is charming, a study in contrast between the simplicity of childhood and the heaviness of adulthood. Readers will fly through this slim novel, which is perfect for discussion.

Ferrada debuts with a pithy bildungsroman about a Chilean girl whose parents' marriage never recovers from the loss her mother experienced under the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. Seven-year-old M spends most of her time as an unofficial sales associate for her father, D, a traveling hardware salesman who is "nothing special as a father" but "an excellent employer." M regularly accompanies him on business trips and lies to her emotionally absent mother about her resulting school absences. As the subterfuge grows and years pass, M's job takes up more of her time and she becomes a savvy businesswoman who develops an understanding of the universe as run by "the Great Carpenter." Things begins to derail, however, when she and her father encounter E, a photographer who takes pictures of ghosts he sees at the graves of those disappeared by the Pinochet regime. When M discovers E and her mother are childhood friends and linked by a ghost both can see, their family's tenuous life and the lies that bind them unravel. Ferrada keeps the plot moving along with a winning combination of M's perceptiveness and innocence. A moving tribute to childhood, Ferrada's novel is an enthralling tale of resilience, deception, and trauma during a dark time in Chile's history. (Feb.)

A traveling salesman and his daughter traverse Chile. "Every person tries to explain the inner workings of things with whatever is at hand," says M, the charming narrator of Ferrada's English-language debut. "I, at seven years of age, had reached out my hand, and had grasped a Kramp catalogue." Kramp is a brand of hardware products that M's father, a traveling salesman, hawks in various small towns across their native Chile. M takes to skipping school so she can accompany her father, D. Along the way, she acquires various bits of hardware-related wisdom. For instance: "Every construction is the sum of its parts, parts that are joined by fittings." M and D quickly discover that M's presence positively impacts D's chances of making a sale, and before long, she's missing weeks of school at a stretch. Things grow more complicated when E, a photographer, starts traveling with them in search of "ghosts." These are the Pinochet years, it turns out, and what has seemed at first to have all the charm and magic of a fairy tale carries a much darker underbelly as well. Ferrada, who has published several children's books, excels in her depictions of M's 7-year-old state of mind, her attempts to understand the world she's been born into. The book progresses at a quick clip until it is stalled by a scene of some horror. Then M must find a new way to find order in her family and in the wider world. This quick and quirky book is as charming as it is unsettling, as appealing as it is wise. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.