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Cranor's latest dispatch from Arkansas uses a red-hot kidnapping plot to propel a modern-day version of Upton Sinclair's THE JUNGLE. The result is a compelling and timely page-turner that exposes American inequality, second-shift gender roles, and where those cheap rotisserie chickens come from.
Gabriela Menchaca and her boyfriend Edwin Saucedo work for the biggest employer in the area, the Detmer Foods chicken processing plant. Their days are brutally hard, on their feet for more hours than they are paid, their hands aching from having to repeatedly wrench chicken carcasses apart on a line that gets faster and faster, where workers resort to wearing diapers because there are no bathroom breaks. Gabby and Edwin, both undocumented and fearful of deportation, have a future planned out – in five years if they've saved up enough they can move away – but meanwhile, their life is one, long grind, one that was made more grim when Gabriela's pregnancy ended in a miscarriage brought on by harsh working conditions.
In the same Arkansas town, Mimi and Luke Jackson have everything Gabriela and Edwin dream of, and more. As the manager of the chicken processing plant, Luke earns enough to own a huge home and expensive cars. His wife stays home with their infant son, her luxurious life weighed down by isolation and postpartum depression. Luke is ambitious and plans to move up, but meanwhile he has an inspection to pass. That morning, to show he's a hard-nosed boss worthy of promotion, he publicly fires Edwin so other employees don't follow his example of agitating for the overtime wages that are routinely stolen from the workers. When Mimi hurries to the plant to hand over a briefcase Luke left behind, Edwin impulsively takes their baby and goes on the run, an act of desperation that lands them all in a world of trouble.
The plot is expertly assembled like a fine Swiss watch, the pace is relentless, and the dilemma unfolds moment by moment. But that doesn't detract from finely wrought characters and a memorable, even scorching setting, and that's what lingers when the action is resolved. Perhaps the most touching line in the book is in the dedication: "for my first-block students who couldn't stay awake; now I know why."
BROILER could be called rural noir, but it doesn't indulge in the artful cynicism of classic noir, where the women are duplicitous sirens leading men down a dark path. Here, it's the women who are the ones with a moral compass, ultimately throwing a wrench in the noir trajectory of things always lurching from bad to worse.
Cranor has devised a pulse-pounding narrative but in the end his story is about how wealth and corporate power have turned the American dream for so many into a nightmare. And while it may put you off buying that tempting rotisserie chicken the next time you're at the store, it's well worth the sacrifice.
§ Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, July 2024
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