“Look, sir, here’s your dog. I told you dog weren’t like me, dogs stick around.”
“And they’d tell me that if I was going to be so distrustful of the outsiders, I’d end up hating them, and in small towns hatred is more dangerous than guns, the forest, or illness.”
With perhaps the most perfect cover, the unassuming That’s All I Know, by Elisa Levi (2021) (translated from the Spanish by Christina Macsweeney – 2025) is likely going to be in my top reads of the year. Coming in at 154 pages, the novel is a monologue, and I sat right still and listened to Little Lea’s story.
The novel opens with 19-year-old Lea encountering a stranger hellbent on entering the woods to retrieve his dog. She stops him, cautioning that people don’t come back from the forest, and says she will wait with him for his dog to return. So, they wait. And Lea, quite the chatterbox, smokes a little pot and tells him her life story, focusing on the events of the past year that revolve around a new couple moving into the small town of ~200 folks and the rumored end of the world.
Lea is preparing to the leave the small town – a preparation that has been in the works for years, but she’s reached the point of no return. She talks about her family, especially her sister, Nora. Nora is special needs – confined to a wheelchair and nonverbal. She cries when she is in pain and when Lea is overcome with emotion, she’ll pinch or poke her to make her cry.
Lea’s best friends are Javiar, born on the same day as Nora and the person Lea most wants to love her, Marco, the rough and tumble man who loves Lea but has anger issues, and Catalina, the girl who loves love and is always crying. The town is all they know, all Lea knows, and she has to get out.
It’s a trapped story, a life anchored in place and unfulfilled, and a desire laced with guilt and fear to escape it.
A Girl Named Tommi 