Elita is one of those books that starts out feeling like a quiet little mystery and then suddenly you’re fully obsessed. The book takes place in 1951 in the Pacific Northwest, and follows two women—well, a woman and a girl—who’ve both been abandoned in completely different ways. The story kicks off when two prison guards on their lunch break stumble across a feral teen on Elita Island. She doesn’t speak, nobody knows where she came from, and suddenly the whole place is buzzing. Enter Bernadette Baston, a professor who studies language but definitely wasn’t signing up for teaching the girl to talk. Still, she gets pulled in, partly because Atalanta Doe is fascinating… and partly because digging into the girl’s past means asking questions the locals really don’t want asked.
What’s cool is that Bernadette is dealing with her own version of being left behind—her husband walked out years ago, leaving her to raise a daughter and juggle her academic career in a world that barely takes women seriously. The book does an amazing job balancing the mystery of Atalanta with the everyday (and honestly kind of brutal) reality of being a woman expected to hold everything together yet having no real power as a female over the whims of men, and her husband specifically (and that storyline made me absolutely want to scream and throw things). In fact, by the end of the book, I was more focused on Bernadette’s personal storyline than the mystery of Elita. It’s sharp, atmospheric, and full of tiny details that make the whole thing feel polished without being precious. If you’re into smart mysteries with big emotional undercurrents—and stories about women quietly rewriting the rules—Elita is seriously worth your time.