Pull Me Under explores and dismantles the trope of “woman with a dark secret resists suburbia and its trappings” that usually manifests in unfortunate, infantilizing “Girl” thrillers - Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, etc. Her life becomes jigsaw puzzles and playdates, her greatest concern whether or not her family will relocate to a tacky suburban community called Tuscany Terrace. That is, until her father, Living National Treasure violinist Hiro Akitani, passes away and Rio returns to Japan for the first time in twenty years.Īt turns searing and sincere, Luce explores the implications of identity and the weight of secrecy. In the intervening years, Chizuru changes her name to Rio, becomes a nurse and starts a family unaware of her past. Granted the opportunity to leave Japan to attend college in Colorado, Chizuru relinquishes her citizenship and leaves the event that has defined her personhood for the majority of her life, far across an ocean. At the beginning of Kelly Luce’s novel Pull Me Under, twelve-year-old Chizuru Akitani fatally stabs her bully, Tomoya Yu, with a letter opener from her teacher’s desk. Retained for the entirety of her adolescence in a juvenile detention center and disowned by her father, Chizuru sets about the difficult work of reinventing herself: she picks up running and loses the weight that attracted Tomoya Yu’s ridicule, she attempts to grapple with events of the day she snapped.
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