The Tangled World of Bodies

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