The Mortifications, Derek Palacio’s beautifully written debut novel, begins in 1980, during the Mariel boatlift that took refugees from Cuba to the United States. Soledad Encarnación packs her 12-year-old son, Ulises, and his twin sister, Isabel, onto an overcrowded lobster boat that carries them away from their village of Buey Arriba. Her husband, Uxbal, chooses to stay behind, but not without first trying to prevent his family’s departure by holding Isabel ransom.

In Connecticut, Soledad becomes a court stenographer and attracts the attention of lawyers who find her exotic. She falls in love with Henri Willems, a Dutch horticulturalist who grows Cuba’s Habano tobacco in the Connecticut River Valley.

At 17, Ulises, a budding Latin scholar, gets a job working in Henri’s fields. The more devout Isabel volunteers with the terminally ill at Jude the Apostle. Soon, she takes a vow of chastity and silence and leaves for Guatemala to establish a school funded by the church. And all of this is before Soledad’s diagnosis of breast cancer and a letter from Uxbal, who demands his family’s return to Cuba.

The Mortifications is a devastating portrait of the realities we construct for ourselves, the parts of our history we choose to embrace and those we yearn to escape. In deceptively simple prose, Palacio writes movingly of dreams and family legacies and reminds us that, no matter how far away you travel, some aspects of one’s ancestry are forever a part of you.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, October 2016

It may be no coincidence that the female protagonists of Brit Bennett’s remarkable debut are 17 at the start of the story: This was Bennett’s age when she first began writing The Mothers. Now, after nearly a decade of work, Bennett has completed a mature and moving masterpiece about the indelible bond between mothers and daughters and what it means for motherless girls to grow into women.

We meet Nadia Turner during her senior year of high school. It should be a time of excitement and anticipation, but Nadia is reeling from her mother’s recent suicide. She attempts to dull her pain through various acts of rebellion, including a romance with the pastor’s son, Luke. Their fling turns serious, however, when Nadia discovers she is pregnant, and their decision about how to handle her condition will shape the lives of Luke, Nadia and her religious best friend, Aubrey, in ways none of them can imagine. As the years pass, despite their collective efforts to move on, Nadia’s secret forms an inescapable anchor to the past. The aftershocks of her choice—and the nagging question of what might have been—continue to haunt the trio, threatening to unravel their friendship and shake the foundations of their tight-knit black community in Southern California.

Sharply observed and written in soul-searing prose, The Mothers is a powerful first novel that isn’t afraid to tackle tough issues, taking a hard look at family, friendship, grief and growing up. In a de facto Greek chorus, the united voice of the elderly church mothers in the community who have seen it all narrate the proceedings, punctuating events with their wise and wistful insights. Bennett’s writing is ripe with emotion and empathy, but she exhibits impressive restraint, never veering into melodrama. Moreover, her inspired juxtaposition of Nadia and Audrey—how their mothers have each wounded them in different but equally damaging ways, how they attempt to make themselves whole and compensate for their losses, how they each choose to emulate or reject their mothers in turn—is fascinating, and perfect fodder for lively book club discussions. Filled with compassionate storytelling and unforgettable characters, The Mothers is a provocative introduction to a talented new author.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Brit Bennett about The Mothers.

When Rose Lewin’s boss pushes her for story ideas, she can’t help but look to her own residence. The space she inhabits is a newly renovated condo. But half a century ago, her New York City apartment got its start as a room in the Barbizon Hotel for Women. Although the building has been updated—with prices to prove it—a few of the building’s 1950s residents still call it home. These women, now in their 80s, are sequestered away on the fourth floor. There’s got to be a story there, Rose thinks, and she convinces her boss to let her dig in.

But making an in-depth, historical piece resonate with readers in a digital era isn’t going to be as easy as she thinks. Although she was drawn to the unfortunately named WordMerge because it promised to be a sort of multimedia New Yorker, the realities of media on the internet are closing in. Rose must find a captivating angle to keep the story alive.

And she’s convinced she would have just that in the fourth floor’s Darby McLaughlin—if only Darby would speak to her. The story becomes an obsession, distracting Rose from the job and romance falling to pieces around her.

In The Dollhouse, debut novelist Fiona Davis begins with a simple premise. But as the book advances, through alternating looks at Rose’s world in 2016 and Darby’s in 1952, the story becomes increasingly complex. Davis layers on relationships and intrigue, while building tension through her story structure. Each glimpse at Darby’s world leaves both Rose and the reader yearning for more, and eager to understand exactly what shaped the ladies at this women’s residence. The pace quickens as the story hurtles to its surprising—but satisfying—end. Who said history had to be dull, anyway?

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Behind the Book feature by Fiona Davis on The Dollhouse.

It is clear that the ideas behind The Nix have been swimming around in first-time novelist Nathan Hill’s head for many years. Deriving its title from the name of a Norwegian spirit that takes people away from the ones they love, this 640-page novel takes on just about everything—including pop culture, advertising, trigger warnings, politics, the degradation of literature, ghosts and the obsession with cell phones. Hill weaves these elements into a charged mother-son story with great poise and humor. 

It’s 2011 and Chicago English professor Samuel Andresen–Anderson learns that his mother, Faye, who abandoned the family when he was 11, has been arrested for throwing gravel at a right-wing presidential candidate. Since he owes his publisher another book, Samuel decides he can help his mother—whom he hasn’t seen since she left—and himself by writing an exposé on the woman behind the most-viewed YouTube clip of the moment.

Samuel visits Faye’s Iowa hometown and the Chicago suburbs, searching for fragments of his mother’s story. Hill explores Faye’s past via many angles: flashbacks to dangerous Chicago protests in 1968, Samuel’s memories and even the point-of-view of Faye’s Parkinson’s-ridden father. In these alternating sections, the reader discovers the details about Faye’s life that Samuel longs for. 

The Nix is a slow burn of a novel that explores the importance of empathy, family dynamics and dysfunction. When Samuel begins to understand his mother, he understands himself. Both laugh-out-loud funny and incredibly poignant, The Nix will be known as a great American novel.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kathleen Donohoe’s first novel, Ashes of Fiery Weather, introduces readers to the stubborn, courageous and sometimes flawed women of the Keegan/O’Reilly family. Central to the story is the evolution of firefighting, a multigenerational career that binds the family together.

Donohoe’s characters range across six generations, bound together by devotion, tradition and hardship. Each woman faces her own struggle, from Irish-born Norah, who must find a way to raise a family after her husband is killed in the line of duty, to her stubborn sister-in-law, Eileen, who fights to become one of the first female firefighters in New York City. 

What makes Donohoe’s novel stand out from other family sagas is the authentic insight she brings to her work. Clearly inspired by the author’s own family history, Ashes of Fiery Weather at times feels more like a memoir than a work of fiction. The crowning achievement of the book, however, is Donohoe’s unaffected and chilling portrayal of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. Although readers will know what is coming, this does nothing to dim the force and shock of Donohoe’s depiction, told through the eyes of Eileen, one of the many firefighters on-site that day. 

Ashes of Fiery Weather is a beautifully crafted story, one that serves not only as a homage to the legacy and traditions of New York firefighters, but also to the families who love, support and often mourn them. Donohoe has created an emotional, deeply moving work that will stay with readers long after the last page.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In today’s tense political climate, with immigration in the news almost daily, it is especially welcome to discover Behold the Dreamers, the clear-eyed, thought-provoking debut novel by Imbolo Mbue. No matter your politics, this beautiful novel about an African family starting a new life in a new land offers tremendous insight into people who still come to our shores in search of the American dream. 

In the fall of 2007, Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, can hardly believe his luck when he gets a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, an executive at Lehman Brothers. With this opportunity, Jende can better provide for his wife, Neni, and their growing family. When Clark’s fragile wife, Cindy, offers Neni temporary work at their summer house in the Hamptons, the Jongas feel that finally, everything is going their way. The Jongas begin to make plans for their future, applying for permanent residency and saving for their own home in Yonkers and pharmaceutical college for Neni.   

But not even a year later, the housing bubble bursts and Lehman Brothers collapses. The Edwards marriage unravels further. Jende spends more and more of his time driving Clark to after-hours “assignations” in nearby hotels. Before long, the pressure of keeping secrets for Clark and Cindy threatens not only the Jongas’ marriage but their dreams of a future in a country they still can’t legally call home. 

Mbue herself came to the United States from Limbe, Cameroon, the same town that the Jongas hail from. Behold the Dreamers is her first foray into fiction, which shows in the occasionally choppy plot, as well as the depiction of a wealthy Manhattan couple with problems straight from central casting. But Mbue’s perceptive exploration of the plight of African immigrants, especially in the character of Neni, is fresh and vivid. The book’s unexpected ending provides a welcome dose of realism, making this an utterly unique novel about immigration, race and class—and an important one, as well.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Imbolo Mbue.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

There is a tendency among debut novelists, particularly debut novelists who gravitate to the trappings of genre fiction, to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. Debut novels are very often grand, massive works of tremendous ambition that achieve a great many things but don’t achieve any of them all that well. You can get an epistolary tale of magic realism involving space pirates and lizard monsters and a bunch of Shakespeare references to boot, but none of it ever really gives you a clear sense of voice.

That’s not the case with The Gentleman, the endlessly clever debut from Forrest Leo. This novel weaves together a brilliant sense of voice, a classic comedic touch that’s as potent as it is gentle, and a group of characters that could just as easily exist in a “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” sketch as they could in a P.G. Wodehouse novel. With his first book, Leo delivers us a story that’s entertaining on about a dozen different levels, and he does it with a sense of joy that imbues his often self-serious narrator with a quality that makes every page lovable.

The narrator is Lionel Savage, a popular poet who, despite his success, is going broke. So, in search of financial salvation, he marries Vivien Lancaster, a woman of tremendous notoriety and wealth. It seems like a good idea at the time, but suddenly Lionel finds himself unable to write, and, in a moment of recklessness, accidentally sells his wife to a Gentleman at a party who just happens to be the Devil himself. In an effort to reclaim her, Lionel must venture out with Vivien’s dashing adventurer brother, his butler, an inventor, a bookseller and his often wild sister.

If that all sounds very outlandish to you, that’s because it is, but Leo delivers it all in a way that’s endlessly brisk, charming, and most importantly, clever. Savage’s narration is a series of quips in and of itself, punctuated by footnotes and highlighted by everything from jokes about the present tense to an exchange in which it’s made clear that The Devil doesn’t really like it when people call his home “Hell.” This is a novel propelled by voice, but the voice alone isn’t enough, so Leo bolsters it all with a wickedly funny plot and a series of characters who seem both wholly original yet clearly carved out of the page of a thumping good potboiler. It’s a marriage of old and new that’s never tiring, and it makes for a delightful page-turner.

There’s something not right about the Evans women, the protagonists of Heather Young’s troubling debut novel; her title The Lost Girls is apt.  

The book alternates between chapters narrated by the elderly Lucy Evans, and a semi-omniscient narrator whose focus is Justine, Lucy’s rootless and timid grandniece, who inherits her Minnesota home. The tale begins during the Depression, when Lucy, her sisters Lilith and Emily, and their parents conduct their annual retreat to this same house, then a vacation home by a lake. We know that something’s wrong with this bunch from the start, and as the summer wears on the wrongness curdles, then erupts into horror. 

Much of what’s wrong with the generations of Evans women begins with the men in—and out of—their lives. We start with the sisters’ dad, Thomas. They and their mother Eleanor are afraid of him. He is a bit authoritarian, but that trait seems mediated by a gentleness and keen intelligence. He even takes Lucy fishing one morning. They have a good time. What’s there to fear? Also, why is Eleanor so suffocatingly protective of 6-year-old Emily? Why are Lucy and Lilith, who share an intense bond, so mean to the little girl?         

Then there’s Justine, abandoned by her husband and left to raise their two daughters in San Diego. Terrified of loneliness, she takes up with then tries to leave Patrick, a man who can only be called a successful sociopath. We meet Justine’s ghastly and embittered mother, Maurie, who flitted from man to man like a bedraggled moth when Justine was a child and deprived her of anything like stability. Both Patrick and Maurie, daughter of Lilith, manage to track Justine down in Minnesota in the middle of winter. The results are what you’d expect.

Though a veteran of a few writing seminars and workshops, Young is a lawyer, one of a line who have become writers of fiction. What many of these attorney/writers share is a fondness for the detail that seems unimportant at first but then becomes crucial and bits of evidence that lead to an irrefutable conclusion. Young’s summation: the patriarchy hurts women and girls, but it hurts men and boys just as much. This might not be news, but in Young’s hands it feels startling and essential.

There are some writers who represent a world with such immediacy that it’s scary. You wonder what their experience was. Has he or she ever actually been there, or done that? This is the feeling you’ll get when you read Scott Stambach’s debut novel, The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko.

The book is the diary of a severely crippled Belorussian boy who’s spent his whole life in a hospital for sick children. Born in 1987, his deformities, and those of his fellow inmates, were no doubt caused by the radiation that resulted from the Chernobyl disaster. So the perfidy and carelessness of adults lies always in the story’s background, as well as in the foreground. Save the saintly and maternal Natalya, most of the nurses are indifferent or sadistic. The mostly unseen post-Soviet bureaucracy makes it clear it has little to spare for these damaged children, even if their damage was caused by another arm of the same bureaucracy.

Seventeen-year-old Ivan copes with this with his fierce intelligence, sarcasm and ability to make life a bit difficult for the staff, even as he lacks one arm, both legs and two fingers on his one hand. Reader, he can do some remarkable things with just two fingers and a thumb. 

Then, Polina arrives. At first, she looks like a normal teenaged girl, but she is probably another instance of Chernobyl’s collateral damage. She has leukemia, and it will kill her. But her blossoming relationship with Ivan gives them both reasons to thrive. Surely, they are a match for each other, for she’s as ornery as he is until the disease knocks the orneriness out of her. Clear your calendar for an afternoon of ugly-crying.

What’s amazing is nothing in Stambach’s C.V. would make a reader think he’d be capable of such a book. His bio says he’s a special ed teacher in a San Diego charter school who’s written for literary magazines. Is that it? How does he know what it’s like to be a boy with half a body, or a girl whose white blood cells and chemo drugs are in a pitched battle over who is going to kill her first? The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko must be counted as a miracle of a book.

If you’ve ever known someone in a coma, you’ve probably sat bedside and talked to him or her. You may have wondered, am I talking to thin air? Does this help?

In I’m Still Here, first-time novelist Clélie Avit explores an answer.

When Elsa regains consciousness, she has already spent months in a hospital bed. A mountain-climbing accident left her in a coma that doctors aren’t sure she can overcome. Awareness is major progress—but Elsa can only hear, not move or speak. No one can tell that her condition has changed. Visitors have decreased in frequency as the months passed. Elsa’s family members speak when they’re around, but mostly to each other, not to Elsa.

Then Thibault stumbles into her room.

It’s a mistake; Thibault is visiting his brother, who has taken up residence a few doors down after a drunk-driving accident in which he was the driver. Things are tense between Thibault and his brother, and it’s exacerbating his mother’s distress. He steps into Elsa’s room looking for a place to get away, but he can’t help but start a conversation once he’s there.

Thibault’s visits give Elsa a thread of hope. She focuses on his words, willing herself to open her eyes or otherwise show she’s still there. And though he can’t explain why, Thibault is convinced that he isn’t just talking to an empty room.

Avit’s debut, translated from French, will draw readers deep into the private worlds of its characters. Their stories are revealed in alternating chapters. Elsa’s is necessarily slow to develop. After months unconscious, she must rely on the words she hears to understand what landed her in this state. Thibault, on the other hand, interacts with other people and moves beyond the world of the hospital. But his is still a private viewpoint, as he is slow to let people in.

I’m Still Here is a study in character development. It’s a quiet novel that packs dramatic tension into a mostly one-room world. Avit’s deft hand suggests the promise of more to come.

Vivian Feld lived 18 years before she felt alive at all.

Viv’s first year of college was as nondescript as her reflection in the mirror. She attended classes, completed assignments and was asked multiple times to join cults. What is it that makes me look like the kind of person who would be suckered into joining a cult? she wonders.

Though she may not have recognized it, Viv was waiting to be swept into the orbit of something bigger than herself. That’s exactly what she finds upon moving to an off-campus apartment with Andy and Lee.

Andy is an audiophile, an average guy, but Lee is a tempest, seemingly the typical bad girl waiting to corrupt Viv’s by-the-book lifestyle. She’s the daughter of the late rock star Jesse Parrish and model-then-fashion-designer Linda West. Lee doesn’t recall much of her father; she was 4 when he drove into a ravine with his mistress in the passenger seat. Jesse left behind a limited music catalog, his wife’s angst and, eventually, his daughter’s curiosity. 

In college Lee pulls both Viv and Andy toward her, feeding off their attention. But a decade later, Viv and Andy are a unit and Lee is a memory. Viv hasn’t heard from her best friend in years—until Lee resurfaces, asking for Viv’s help. Lee is determined to find the album her father was recording when he died, and she wants Viv to come along for the ride.

Chicago journalist Deborah Shapiro’s sharp, funny and engrossing debut novel, The Sun in Your Eyes, appears at a glance to be an examination of female friendship. It’s that, sure; through the juxtaposition of the women’s college days and their present-day road trip, Shapiro delves into her characters’ psyche and reveals how they shaped one another. But the novel goes deeper still, as Lee and Viv are forced to examine their relationships with everyone close to them. As they uncover the truth about the past, the friends are left to decide whom they trust and how to move forward.

Nine-year-old Leon, a mixed-race boy born in 1970s London to a depressed and drug-addicted mother, opens Kit de Waal’s mesmerizing debut as he tells his newborn baby brother, Jake, that he will always take care of him. But Jake is white and, being a baby, is much easier to place for adoption than Leon—so when their mother is finally deemed unfit to care for them, the boys are separated.

The author has worked in family law and as an advisor to Social Services, and she has brought that experience to this poignant first novel. My Name Is Leon depicts with agonizing clarity the details of Leon’s plight: He does poorly in school, grinds his teeth and has recurring nightmares, all the while never giving up hope that he will see Jake again someday.

Historical moments are skillfully blended into the story, first with Leon’s foster mother Maureen’s plans for a party to celebrate the upcoming wedding of Lady Diana and Prince Charles. But the overriding theme of de Waal’s provocative, moving novel is the power of love between siblings, and the commitment needed by those who deal with the difficulties inherent in fostering children. Blending elements of The Language of Flowers with a brave child narrator that recalls Emma Donoghue’s Room, Leon’s story is one that readers will not soon forget.

"Once you go, you know" used to be the official slogan of Jamaica's tourism board. It is a slogan brimming with ambiguity. For example, you might come to know that some of Jamaica's tourism is sexual in nature. Or that for many years, the country had one of the highest murder rates in the world. Jamaican Nicole Dennis-Benn's debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, reveals the shadier aspect of this sunny locale.

The novel revolves around a 30-year-old woman named Margot. When Margot was young her mother rented her to a tourist for several hundred dollars. And not for sightseeing. As an adult, Margot continues the practice in her own right. She comes to manage several other women plying the skin trade. Margot is also a closeted lesbian in a country that refers to them as sodomites.

Margot justifies her work as a sacrifice to her half-sister, Thandi. Thandi is in school, speaks proper English and is destined to become a doctor outside of Jamaica. Or at any rate, that is Margot's aspiration for her sister, who prefers art and falls for a local boy. Thandi also aspires to being fair-skinned. To that end she treats her skin with a soup of unpleasant chemicals. All this to escape the "ugliness of being black and poor."

But Margot's work becomes self-justifying; the higher goals grow blurry. In Dennis-Benn's Jamaica, tourist development undermines the country's pride in itself. Driven by foreign capital, development also proves indifferent to local communities. The same story plays out almost anywhere that tourism dominates. But Dennis-Benn's portrayal gives names and faces to this externality of globalization.

From the book's opening scenes, the author conjures vivid and passionate characters. Not one is a spectator to her fate. Most speak in the island's familiar patois, and they revere and resent those who don't. Similarities to fellow Caribbean writer Edwidge Danticat, or early V.S. Naipaul, are plentiful. The novel buzzes with eroticism, even when the circumstances are compromising or sordid. And the author manages to portray her fallen characters free of judgment. The Jamaica tourism slogan wouldn't be a bad subtitle for this rich, accomplished novel.