The Tangled World of Bodies
Danya Kukafka’s debut novel brings new depth to the tropes of the thriller
by Jenessa Abrams
Jul 26, 2017
5 minutes
Danya Kukafka begins her debut novel, Girl in Snow, by asking her readers to look at a dead female body. Despite how it sounds, it’s actually common, our societal default, to view a female primarily as a physical object, to neglect her humanness and see instead “her shoulder blades and how they framed her naked spine, like a pair of static lungs,” as one of the novel’s narrators says of the fifteen-year-old Lucinda Hayes. Kukafka attempts to subvert preconceptions, principally of what is expected of the thriller genre, but succeeds more pointedly in destabilizing the biases
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