We also see the disparate parenting styles of the families of her group of friends through the honest and cynical veil of Jude’s adolescence. Through Jude’s lens, we see the disparate lifestyles of Pasadena, from mansions to seedy rentals to crumbling but cozy beach houses, from teens driving cars that cost more than I make in a year to teens driving camper vans to surf at the beach to teens like Jude, with only her feet for transportation. Through her, we see and feel both the devastation of her loss and her determination to discover what really happened the night that Maggie died. Foremost is the voice of the narrator, Jude. There are so many things to adore in this novel.
IT seems that she was everyone’s best friend, and now she is gone. Just as Jude has a secret that she has only shared with Maggie, so also have the others confided in Maggie. Maggie was the center of the wheel, and all her friends, including Jude, are the spokes. And there is the fact that she must confront, now that Maggie is gone, that their group of friends was really only held together by Maggie. There is the situation at home with her mother’s boyfriend, Roy. There is the failed attempt at a relationship with her other best friend, Joey, that she is trying to ignore.
She rushes back to California to confront any number of situations she was trying to escape. It is the summer before their senior year, and Jude is on the east coast visiting cousins when she gets the phone call letting her know that her best friend Maggie has been found dead in her family’s swimming pool. What Smith has produced this time, in Pasadena, is a devastatingly honest exploration of loss, grief, trauma, friendship and family – both the kind we are born into and the kind we choose. Smith’s new novel Pasadena solely on the basis of my deep enjoyment of her last one, The Toymaker’s Apprentice. She is a marvelously gifted author, but I had no idea what I was getting into.
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