2022 Debut Review: OUR LITTLE WORLD by Karen Winn

OUR LITTLE WORLD by Karen Winn is a captivating debut novel about coming of age in the wake of tragedy, and the strong and strange bonds of sisterhood. Protagonist Bee Kocsis recounts two deaths beginning in June 1985 in the seemingly safe suburb of Hammond, New Jersey. Winn’s writing is gripping from the start: “My sister isn’t the only dead girl I’ve known, and not the first, either. Before Audrina, there was Sally.” Four-year-old Sally Baker, next-door neighbor to the Kocsis sisters, vanishes from the local lake that summer. Suspicion is cast over the whole community. Bee even makes a list of suspects in her diary and continues to update as the days pass and police have no leads.   

            Missing children are a common subject in the mystery/thriller genre, but Winn’s treatment is much more nuanced and self-aware. Bee tries to understand her community’s strange fascination over Sally’s disappearance that’s like “a dark fairytale that they couldn’t stop re-telling.” The novel feels eerie and intriguing in the same way.

            Bee and her younger sister Audrina cycle through guilt and fear over Sally’s disappearance. They battle each other over secrets and responsibility, but also share a fierce love and constant competition that is familiar to those of us with sisters (I have two.) The reader will come to love Audrina and will feel the ache of her absence leading to an almost magical haunting, “I see my sister’s small hands clasped around the same passenger pole I am clinging to in the crowded subway. We are all packed in, our fingers curling around the pole one on top of another in a tree ring formation, but I instantly recognize the creases in her knuckles and the way her pinky sits at an odd angle—the result of a bike accident when we were young.” I was often reminded of Julia Glass’s I SEE YOU EVERYWHERE. Both of these beautiful novels were deeply moving and left tears dripping onto the pages.

Step back in 1985 to meet Bee Kocsis and her sister Audrina in this coming-of-age story by a new talent.