THE GIRL IN THE WHITE CAPE

In Sapienza’s folkloric debut novel, an orphaned teenager raised by a priest is confronted by the reappearance of her Russian mother.

Fifteen-year-old Elena resides in the attic of the onion-domed Our Lady of Sorrows church in San Francisco, where her mother left her as a baby (for reasons unknown to Elena) to be raised by a kindly priest known as Father Al. Instead of attending public school, Elena receives tutoring six days a week from Baba Vera, an old, witchlike woman whose pedagogy takes the form of unending housework. “You are special,” Father Al told Elena long ago when she asked why she didn’t go to school with other kids in the neighborhood, adding, “You are meant to study with Baba until she fulfills her plan.” Elena’s only friends are her childhood doll, Kukla, and the beautiful Vasilisa, the girl’s imaginary companion. Then two new people unexpectedly enter her life. One is Anya Prokioff, a Russian woman who arrives in town and claims to be Elena’s mother, though Father Al seems suspicious. The other is Frank Hudson, a friendly young taxicab driver who worries for Elena’s safety. Over the course of this novel, Sapienza’s prose has a fablelike quality; sometimes it relates gauzy scenes, and other times it tells bloody tales, as when Elena butchers a duck for Baba Vera: “She easily removes the gizzards, heart, and liver. Baba loves these parts too. Maybe they will go into a stew, but Baba has also been known to eat them raw. Elena thinks of what Baba said yesterday: ‘To cook, you must kill.’ ” Although the work is ostensibly set in the modern day, Sapienza does little to update the well-known Russian folktale at its heart. No one talks or acts in a manner that modern readers will recognize; indeed, it could easily have been set in medieval Russia with few changes. Fans of fairy tales may enjoy this offbeat retelling, but those expecting a contemporary novel may find themselves befuddled.

A dreamy, heavily stylized retelling of a very old story.