The Invaders

The Invaders by Karolina Waclawiak, 239 pages

The community of Little Neck Cove is your typical upper-middle class neighborhood, with a lovely golf course, beautiful flowers in every garden, and a bevy of pastel polo shirts adorning the residents as they drive their golf carts between the tennis courts and marina. But not all is as it seems. Neighborhood busybody Lori and Cheryl, a second wife who doesn't quite fit in (and one of our two narrators) witness a man who obviously doesn't live in the neighborhood urinating on a fence, getting the neighborhood up in arms and starting Lori on a crusade to build a fence and put up signs to keep the riff raff out. Meanwhile, Teddy (Cheryl's stepson and our other narrator) gets kicked out of college and comes home to wallow in a summer filled with prescription drug abuse, booze, and ogling the younger moms at the pool.

The Invaders is an odd book that finds the cracks in a privileged life and scratches at the veneer until the secrets of the community are laid bare. I'm not entirely sure what I thought of this book, though I'll be mulling it over for a long time. Because it definitely sticks with you.