Gretchen Sparks, a reporter for a down-at-the-heels New York City newspaper, and the protagonist of Erica Ciccarone’s Borough Features, is a delicious conundrum. She’s not exactly unlikable, but she’s someone you’d best be wary around. She’s an alcoholic and doesn’t seem to understand social cues. Maybe her problematic nature stems from her crazy family, which includes her cloying, long-suffering mother; her father, now afflicted with dementia; and her selfish, silly sister Nico. Some of Gretchen’s troubles certainly stem from her grief over the death of her brother Dominic, a medic killed in Afghanistan.
If anyone loves and understands Gretchen Sparks unconditionally and without drama, it’s her editor, Marty. When the book opens, he’s in the hospital thanks to a heart attack, and it doesn’t look good. Marty and Gretchen are so close that his wife asks Gretchen to write his obituary when the time comes.
Marty is, or was, deeply interested in the local color of the outer boroughs, and when we meet Gretchen, she’s on her way to fulfill his last assignment to her: interview a loony Coney Island lady who claims to have a crime-fighting seagull. Soon after this, she meets a boy named Jaime Padilla, who also has an interesting story. Gretchen and the reader quickly find out that Jaime’s tale is but a tiny piece of a much larger and nastier puzzle. As eager to get to the bottom of a story as ever, Gretchen gets pulled right in.
Ciccarone, who is an associate editor at BookPage, knows much about the folkways, to say nothing of the skeevy politics, of Brooklyn and Queens. Her characters—ridiculous, creepy, heartbreaking and always human—are memorable, none more so than Gretchen Sparks, a woman as devastatingly vulnerable as she is hard and cynical. Borough Features is a great debut.
