Protected: The Barn Manager’s Grief Is Hotter Than Foreplay

Anyone who has had their heart broken knows it can turn you into a desperate, tedious person: an amateur detective, archaeologist, ghost hunter, or conspiracy theorist with a wall of red string. Sometimes, you become all of these people at once. Maybe worst of all, heartbreak can make you an embarrassingly prolific storyteller. This is the case in the opening chapter of Genevieve Plunkett’s assured second novel, The Lonely Girl’s Vegetable Patch, in which a young barn manager named Tristan has recently been dumped by a woman named Cleo. It sounds like a relationship that was doomed from the start; Cleo is 17 years Tristan’s senior, married to someone 17 years her senior, and poor Tristan can’t shut up about her.

Tristan talks and talks, as Drew—21, aimless, and the real center of this story—listens. Drew is a whipsmart, witty weirdo: When the creepy boss at her last dead-end job casually asks how rough she likes it, she says “praying mantis rough” without missing a beat. Tristan is supposed to be training Drew to replace him at a horse farm in rural Vermont, but what he’s really doing is deeply reliving the past, telling Drew everything he can about Cleo, wringing out every tiny detail. Cleo could pull hot bread from the oven with her bare hands; Cleo had a gold fleck in her left iris like a grain of mica; Cleo could smell his moods. And Drew, who is “big into smells,” who rides a used Vespa around the countryside with her visor open to appreciate “the musk of the world,” is the perfect audience. She listens to Tristan’s rehashing, she asks follow-up questions. Soon, she begins to feel a pull, too—toward Tristan, yes, but mostly toward the wreckage of his failed relationship. When Drew and Tristan end up at a bar and then at a floodwall by the river, Drew has every chance to steer the evening toward the two of them, but she decides to take a different approach.

Plunkett writes women whose brains are brilliant whirring machines. Her prose is precise and her sense of place and landscape is atmospheric and visceral; clouds are “firm and unhurried” and mountains crowd like a “grandmother’s bunched-up knitting.” I’ve been a fan from the start: Back in 2021, I had the pleasure of blurbing her debut story collection, Prepare Her, which I said was “perfectly calibrated and teeming with style.” That description applies to Lonely Girl’s too, and this time around she is also very, very funny. This is an astonishing novel from a wild talent, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

– Kimberly King Parsons
Author of We Were the Universe