is in part, and often powerfully, a novel about these women. The reader never fully identifies with Ansel, but that seems precisely the point: We don’t need to identify with him in order to understand that his execution is a horror and an outrage. In this way, the novel pushes the reader to think about both the uses and the limitations of empathy in fiction.
Instead, it is the inevitability of Ansel’s execution and the moral abyss of capital punishment that floods the novel with dread. There is no question of who did what, or even why. The narrative tension that animates Girl in Snow is again present, but this time it has a different source. This novel is defiantly populated with living women it ruminates on trauma, the criminal justice system and guilt.
Kukafka aims to undo some of these conventions, including the preoccupation with dead women, in order to explore more ambiguous and ambitious terrain. Kukafka moves nimbly among those multiple strands.
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