Sing Her Down by Ivy Pochoda

Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux/MCD on May 23, 2023

Sing Her Down isn’t quite Thelma and Louise, but it echoes the theme of two outlaw women celebrating their freedom from men. The story differs in that the women are not friends. They start the novel in prison, both having chosen an outlaw path before they meet. Like the women in the iconic movie, however, they embark on a crime spree that is more impulsive than planned. They commit crimes they can’t outrun.

Florence Baum is known in prison as Florida. She comes from California money. She was on a lark with her boyfriend when, seeking vengeance against people who ripped them off, he threw a Molotov cocktail that started a fire and killed two people. She drove the getaway car — her Jaguar — and was convicted as an accomplice to murder.

Diana Diosmary Sandoval is known as Dios. She views female empowerment as having the strength to dominate or kill the people who bother you. An inmate named Kace who narrates an occasional chapter calls Dios’ philosophy “fucked up feminist nonsense.” Kace has conversations with dead people so her perspective might not be entirely reliable.

The Arizona prison where they’re serving time decides to grant early releases to suitable inmates to protect them from COVID-19. Florida gets one and promptly violates parole by catching a bus to California. Dios gets an improbable release and joins Florida on the bus. Dios apparently knew where Florida would be staying immediately after her release and followed her. How Dios got out of prison is a mystery, given her history of violent conduct as an inmate.

Florida can’t get away from Dios. They leave the bus at separate times but Dios finds Florida again. For much of the novel, why Dios is pursuing Florida — why Dios is encouraging Florida to commit violent acts — is another mystery. People are sometimes driven to behave in ways that are not easily understood.

Florida is an archetype. She represents those who instigate trouble and refuse to take responsibility for its consequences. Florida blames a boyfriend for beating the father of her friend Ronna. She blames a boyfriend for the murders that sent her to prison. Florida is the kind of person who (both literally and metaphorically) lights the match and blames someone else for starting the fire. America is full of Floridas.

Dios recognizes Florida’s true nature — “always the accomplice and never the perp” —and challenges her to own her violence. Either Dios or Florida killed an inmate named Tina, but they can’t agree about who committed the crime. The reader learns what might be the truth when Tina chats with Kace from beyond the grave.

When Dios exited the bus to resume her search for Florida, she left a body behind. Detective Lobos enters the plot in search of the bus passenger’s murderer. Lobos’ partner can’t believe a woman would cut a larger man’s throat. Lobos believes he undervalues the ability of women to be violent. Lobos muses about all the terms applied to violent women (femme fatales, black widows) that “soften their crimes — to make a sport or light of what they did, to make men able to consider that women can kill.”

Lobos faults herself for not being more violent. She searches for her ex-husband’s face in the faces of the homeless. Even as a cop, she became a domestic violence victim as her husband’s mental health deteriorated. She reviled herself for her weakness. She wants one more chance to stand up to him. She understands how rage can build, how women can kill. She sees the murder on the bus as a statement, “a demonstration of power by someone who wants to be seen.” Perhaps she sees herself that way.

While much of the novel focuses on Florida, Lobos will join the reader in understanding that Dios is more intriguing. While Dios seems to be feral, she doesn’t reveal the fullness of her personality until late in the novel. Sing Her Down is an interesting read because neither Florida nor Dios are exactly the person they initially appear to be.

The plot is atmospheric in both its classic presentation of prison cafeteria fights and its transition to LA noir. Los Angeles in lockdown, the National Guard enforcing a nightly curfew, advances the theme of “a sick city getting sicker.” The unhoused have abandoned their shelters and camps, “creating their own ruins.” Lobos and Florida don’t realize it, but they are connected by the city’s landscape, by the motion they perceive in its murals and its rippling tent cities.

The story ends with a message about the difference between strength and weakness. Violence is not strength. Walking away is not always weakness. Sometimes walking away requires the strength to put the past in the past, to walk in the direction of the future.

The chapters that feature Kace narrating her conversations with dead people are apparently intended to add a cohesive structure to the novel. The novel begins with Kace telling the reader about certain events that will occur in the story, events that might be reflected in a mural. Kace added little of value to the story. Is she really attuned to dead people or is she just crazy? Perhaps the reader is meant to decide that question, but I decided that Kace was annoying. Kace does provide important information that she gleans from Tina’s ghost, but that information could have been conveyed without filtering it through a crazed medium. That’s a relatively small complaint, but the story would have been just as effective without giving Kace a narrative voice.

Kace’s reservations about “feminist nonsense” aside, Ivy Pochoda has something meaningful to say about the choices women make in a world that is too often controlled by violent men. The ending differs from Thelma and Louise, but it’s almost as surprising and similar in its sad inevitability.

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