Noa P. Singelton is on death row, but does she
deserve to be there? That is the mystery posed in The Execution of Noa
P. Singleton, Elizabeth L. Silver's debut novel. Noa herself provides
an answer to the question during the course of the book-or does she?
Noa is not a likable narrator, at least at the
beginning of the story. Seemingly contemptuous of most of the people with
whom she comes into contact, she fancies herself a queen who is attended by her
jailers. She has been in prison for many years, having never spoken a
word in her own defense during a sensational murder trial. When we first
meet Noa, she is six months away from her execution date. Unexpectedly,
she gets a visit that changes her very small death row existence. Marlene
Dixon, a high powered attorney as well as the mother of the girl whom Noa is in
prison for killing, offers to petition the governor to commute Noa's
sentence to life imprisonment in exchange for finding out what really happened
the night her daughter died. As it turns out, Marlene has a few secrets
of her own, and a complicated relationship with Noa that predates her
daughter's murder.
The book is a bit hard to get into at first due to
overly florid language and a less than likable narrator, Noa herself, as well
as other unsympathetic characters. However, the novel quickly becomes a
compelling read that will have the reader on the edge of his or her seat,
tearing through chapter after chapter to find the next link in the story to discover
the truth about what really occurred.
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