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Shell Game will tear at your heart
Book Review
By Derryll White
Paretsky, Sara (2018). Shell Game.
Sara Paretsky has been wedded as a writer to Chicago ever since she introduced her amazing character V.I. Warshawski.
V.I. grew up on Chicago’s South Side, amid the steel mills and dark alleys of a fading industrial complex. Her mother fled Mussolini’s Italy and illegally entered the U.S. Her father was a Chicago cop. Paretsky has used V.I. Warshawski to transform the feminine in detective fiction. Her character is not a victim, not a luscious body spreading pheromones around a suggestive scene. V.I. is a no-nonsense, socially committed woman who has continued to rail against America’s treatment of women and immigrants for more than forty years. An amazing legacy when the reader considers it.
’Shell Game’ is an appeal to family values and national morale. I.C.E., the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement body, has increasingly become a force in U.S. politics and daily existence. Paretsky indicates the areas where the government has become the transgressor in poor immigrants’ urban lives and where the ultra-conservative business class has exploited American women. The author continues here to manifest the reasons she was nominated Ms. Magazine’s 1987 ‘Woman of the Year.’
Paretsky demands that the reader consider social justice and what that means to the ordinary world each of us inhabits. This story has many layers but they all come back to the world we now live in and what we intend to do to make life more livable for the unrepresented. Paretsky is a master at blending humanity and politics into a construct that forces the reader to consider the large forces shaping his or her world. ‘Shell Game’ will tear at your heart.
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Excerpts from the novel:
HELPING HAND – In today’s America, we’ve been brainwashed into thinking we don’t owe each other any help or support. The richer we are, the more inclined we are to leave our neighbors and indigent nieces to die on the side of the road.
DETAINED AMERICA – My own mother came to America in 1944 at nineteen, illegally, after her Italian-Jewish mother was taken into custody by the Fascists. Gabriella’s life here hadn’t been easy, but no one tried to throw her out, throw her back to certain death. How had we become the country that imprisoned children for the crime of not having a birth certificate?
PRIVILEGE – The hyper-wealthy aren’t like you and me. Not, as Hemingway supposedly told Fitzgerald, because they have more money, but because the money makes them think their needs, however debased, should be met on the instant. A billionaire’s bacchanal in the Caribbean where members brought beautiful women as party favors for their friends seemed vile; the idea that the billionaires entertained themselves by bidding on the women was beyond vile.
My vocabulary was too limited for me to come up with a word for the disgust and rage I felt.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
