L’Air du Temps (1985)
Zinnia Zompa is 13. She lives outside Providence with her sister Zenobia, who is a nuisance, and with her parents, who are perplexing. Her father runs a factory that makes plastic beads. He drives a Lincoln, but it has been stolen. Dad’s accountant was Mr. Marfeo, who was recently murdered in the back seat of a yellow Mercury. “What it means to be thirteen: you scoff at your brokenhearted mother, and death just feels like a change in the weather.” Dazzling, haunting, and finely wrought, this is a short novel of wondrous shadows just slightly out of reach.