A little luck

Piñeiro (Elena Knows) offers an engaging story of a woman's reinvention and reckoning with the past. It's been 20 years since brown-eyed, red-haired Mary Lohan was in Buenos Aires, where she was the blue-eyed blonde María Elena. Mary's American partner died recently in Boston, and she doesn't know the status of her Argentine husband, whom she left in the wake of an accident, the details of which Piñeiro doles out slowly. Now, Mary is back, sent by a college prep program to evaluate the suburban private school Saint Peter's for affiliation. As María, she lived near Saint Peter's; after the accident, she became the neighborhood's "sad celebrity." Consequently, she's both afraid of being recognized and perturbed when people don't know who she was. During one of her teacher interviews, Mary's composure and her barrier of secrecy are shattered. Though the details around her accident and her ensuing actions are presented a bit too tidily, the revelations hit hard nonetheless, as does Piñeiro's account of how María was treated as a monster by her community before she left. It adds up to a striking meditation on loss and the search for home. (July)

A woman returns home to Argentina decades after tragedy drove her away. This finely translated novel about guilt, love, and forgiveness is narrated by Mary Lohan, a teacher at the highly regarded Garlik Institute of Boston. But she's also someone else, in self-exile due to a painful secret from her early life in Temperley, a province of Buenos Aires. "Certain actions can't be explained away," she says. "There are some things that no logic can justify. Maybe abandoning a six-year-old child is one of them. Unjustifiable." She has changed her name, hair and eye color, and lost weight. She hasn't seen her son, Federico Lauría, or her husband for 20 years, with no intention of going back. But almost by accident--one instance of the luck in the book's title--forces in her new life compel Mary back to Temperley to evaluate a school for the Institute, and she's suddenly face to face with her grown son, who's now a teacher there. He alone recognizes Mary, but he tells no one. They maintain a professional distance as Mary evaluates the school. But Federico gives her an essay explaining his perspective on the tragedy he witnessed that led to Mary's abandoning him. Mary's immense grief then resurfaces as she reels from seeing Federico and reads his words, which end with a plea asking her to explain her actions. While the plot leans heavily at times on coincidence, this doesn't detract from the nuanced, emotional core of the story as we learn why Mary made her excruciating decision, and her reply to her son shows how the arc of her life led to the pain she and Federico believed would be endless. A moving story about the courage to face the past and earn a chance at redemption. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.