Eleven-year-old Polly McClusky is shy, too old for the teddy bear she carries with her everywhere, when she is unexpectedly reunited with her father, Nate, fresh out of jail and driving a stolen car.
He takes her from the front of her school into a world of robbery, violence, and the constant threat of death.
And he does it to save her life.
Meet Polly: eleven years old and smart beyond her years. But she’s a loner, always on the outside, until she is unexpectedly reunited with her father.
Meet Nate: fresh out of jail and driving a stolen car, Nate takes Polly from the safety of her quiet existence into a world of robbery, violence and the constant threat of death.
And he does it to save her life.
IN A NUTSHELL
‘She Rides Shotgun’ is an astonishingly good debut novel – no wonder it won the Edgar Award For Best First Novel (2018). It’s propulsive, violent, and engaging. The writing is fresh and effortlessly accomplished. The plot delivers an escalating threat, leading to a crescendo of violence, yet it avoids being a celebration of violence, keeping it always as a tool to be used with control and purpose, rather than surrendered to. This novel is structured as a bildungsroman with a twist. It focuses on how her experience of violence shapes who eleven-year-old Polly McClusky, the girl with the gunslinger eyes and the watermelon hair, will choose to become.
‘She Rides Shotgun’ initially seemed to be an outlaw-on-the-run story, with one violent criminal with a price on his head being hunted by well-connected gangs of killers. This isn’t a plot I’d normally be interested in. What placed ’She Rides Shotgun’ outside the conventions of this kind of ‘outlaw’ book and made it interesting to me was that it had a child as the central character, a child who, like her father, is marked for death. This changed everything. It raised the stakes on the choices she and her father faced, and it made the options (armed robbery, negotiations with a Cartel boss, gunfights with would-be assassins) more disturbing. I found myself rooting for Polly’s survival even while the cost of that survival mounted with every page.
At the start of the novel, Polly and her recently released from prison father were estranged. They were brought together first by their flight from danger and then by the risks they decided to take to get their death sentences removed. Their growing intimacy was powered by violence that was vividly and realistically described, but which was observed with as little judgment as if it were weather. Polly’s education in violence taught her that: it is better to give than to receive, that inflicting it and surviving it can both be exciting, and that giving in to that excitement, letting violence become a hunger that must be fed rather than a tool to be used, is a path to destruction.
‘She Rides Shotgun’ kept me deeply engaged from the first page to the last. It was a fast-paced, tense, violent thriller. It was also a novel of powerful juxtapositions: fear and excitement, cuteness and violence, grief and joy, riotous freedom and inescapable doom, that I found mesmerising. Most powerful of all was that the story had at its heart a little girl with gunslinger eyes,watermelon coloured hair, an emotional support teddy bear who became braver and more excited by the day, and the unspoken, undoubtable, unbreakable love between the girl and her marked-for-death outlaw father.
I recommend the audiobook version of ‘She Rides Shotgun’. David Marantz’s narration was excellent. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample.
Jordan Harper was an established screenwriter before his first novel, ‘She Rides Shotgun’ was published, so I wasn’t surprised to find that he was involved in adapting ‘She Rides Shotgun’ into a movie. Then I saw the trailer, and it seemed to me that the film had become something quite different: less subtle, more sensational and less original. Below is the trailer for the movie and a CrimeReads article, in which Jordan Harper talks about writing the novel and the challenges and disappointments involved in adapting it for the screen:
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