East Justice
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
East Justice is a small fictional town in rural Iowa, which harbors a tiny enclave of Jewish families. Among them lives Grace, a young woman with the cauterized “tongue of a bird,” farmer, quilter, and keeper of family secrets.
Through a succession of lucid scenes delivered in the measured pace of true memory, Grace tells her own coming of age story in a language evocative of the rolling Midwestern landscape. What emerges is a sometimes dream-like family saga, peopled with characters both human and not: an immigrant grandmother, an absent father, an unhappy mother, a family home, a small prolific farm.
A novel of loss and recovery, East Justice reads like a long drive among the hills. Braverman’s richly textured prose and clear, searching eye delivers to us an American Midwest that is varied, beautiful, and dramatic for its simplicity, infusing the secret rituals of daily life with meaning and light.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As if precisely wielding a tiny size-12 needle, Braverman has stitched a densely patterned coming-of-age quilt. In an old house on five unmowed Iowa acres, 30-ish narrator Grace stitches quilts from remnants and recalls a life in which she has been "utterly, inexcusably alone." Grace's grandmother, who remembers Cossack raids in her native Russia, dies just after Grace's bat mitzvah. Grace's father has moved out; and when her mother has a breakdown, Grace is separated from her siblings and sent from rural East Justice to live with cousins in Granite Bluffs. Grace's recollections of discovered sexuality and refuge in marijuana are among the most vivid and astonishing patches in an intricate bit of linguistic needlework. Later, in a brief stint in Washington State among lesbians and organic gardeners, she meets people surprised to learn of Jews in the Midwest: for Grace, this is the first time she is a person with a past. Returning home after her mother's death, Grace can't let go of the past, or of her longing, becoming a repository for the memories of her scattered family. Braverman fashions exquisite evocations of adolescent loneliness and raw, unfocused desire, but, in the absence of anything resembling a story, this first novel has trouble breathing beneath the humid weight of its own lyricism.
