Dolls Behaving Badly
An out-of-the-ordinary setting and cast of characters are the backbone of Ritchie’s compelling debut novel. Divorced mom Carla lives in an Anchorage trailer park with her precocious eight-year-old son; waitresses at a Mexican restaurant while mourning her art career; and makes explicit, anatomically correct dirty dolls to help pay the bills. She maintains an overinvolved relationship with her chef ex-husband, and, over the course of the book, takes in her teenage babysitter, who was kicked out by her addict mother, and her once-perfect sister, who is now pregnant with a baby that is not her husband’s. When Carla is stressed or wants to show her misfit family love, she turns to her Polish grandmother’s comforting recipes, which are shared in the book, and she spends nights working on a secret series of paintings. Ritchie depicts her characters’ often bleak circumstances with humor and grace, and Carla makes for an atypical but eminently sympathetic heroine. --Aleksandra Walker