Narrated by a 13-year-old girl living in 1970s New York, Here They Come by Yannick Murphy brings pluck and humor as well as a virtuoso writing-style to a novel about a family. Written linearly, but strung together in lyric vignettes, the more explicit details in Murphy’s prose enter in as authentic and integral to the story. The writing may not be like anything you have read before – so densely packed with movement and detail and, well, precociousness – you might fear that this is just another book to feed the mind, not win the heart, but Murphy gets you in the end and gets you good, twists you around with fellow-feeling and with well-crafted sentences that go straight to the edge of love, dysfunction, poverty, growing up, and, of course, straight to the edge of thirteen.

The unnamed adolescent narrator (last name Smith), wise beyond her years, is a tougher-than-thou presence. Living in Manhattan with her mother, her sisters and brother, and the accumulated bags of garbage, which they are too poor to pay to have picked up, they eat lemon-mayonnaise rice while their mother and grandmother, Ma Mère, speak French to each other and ply themselves with booze. The narrator’s father lives out on Long Island with his girlfriend, known only as “the slut,” who the narrator describes as “flat. Her bra size is A ad infinitum. My one tit is already bigger than either one of hers. She looks like an old mother monkey in the wild who breast-fed for years and now she’s all dried up and all that protrudes are her two monstrous nipples that look like they’ve slipped halfway down to her belly…I think my father loves her because she is so flat, because she’s narrow at the hips and looks like a boy behind with her short blond hair, and then she turns around and you realize from her face that she’s a woman, and it’s a surprise and I bet that’s why he loves her.”

Like any thirteen-year-old-girl worth her salt, the narrator has a relationship with a horse, actually a horse cop’s stallion in Central Park, “I go to the park and I see the cop on his stallion again, and the stallion looks at me while I’m scratching my name with a pen into a park bench seat. The cop doesn’t care, but the stallion keeps looking at me like if he didn’t have the cop on his back he’d come right over and strike me down with his hooves. I give the stallion the finger, but only to his chestnut haunch when he’s already passed me by.” She also hangs around the park with one of the legions of foreign hot dog vendors, who feels her up in exchange for hot dogs and candy bars. It’s a dangerous world, but our narrator doesn’t spend time wishing things were any different. Instead she navigates, she negotiates, she says fuck like she’s seen it all, and then she says or does something to remind you that she is only thirteen and has just enough experience to get herself in trouble.

When her father disappears, the search takes his “slut,” along with the narrator’s brother, all the way to Spain, where later sections of book brush by more surreally, but with the same fine focus on observation. Throughout the novel descriptions build through accumulation of detail: “School is steamy. The building warming the wool of our soggy mittens and hats and coats, wet from snowball making and snowball fights. We can hear the snow melting, dripping on closet floors, puddling out from the doors. Everything seems to be seeping out. Lunch can be smelled from the first floor up to the fourth. The odor of fish cakes, spawning its way up the up and down stairs to our rooms. The perfume of teachers teaching seated pupils, spreading through the air from their slight exertions, the use of pointers, page turning and the rolling down of foreign countries’ maps. Something crackly from the loudspeakers. Holiday music played so low between first bell and late bell it could be mistaken for the constant hum of private thoughts.”

In the end Here They Come is a wonderfully realized book, beautifully packaged by McSweeney’s. The neighing stallion on the cover and the smaller fit in the hand mirror Murphy’s narrative itself really: a brave, defiant, ridiculously-gifted upstart that wins you over.