Other Evolutions
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“A phantom ache made real. Garcia vividly chronicles the fraught love within a splintered family, their isolated world rippling with a hint of the uncanny beneath her polished prose.” —Andrew F. Sullivan, author of The Marigold
With sharp human insight and unflinching prose, Other Evolutions is O. Henry Prize-winning author Rebecca Hirsch Garcia’s dark, speculative debut, perfect for readers of Iain Reid and Emily St. John Mandel.
Alma Alt, the sheltered youngest daughter of an interfaith, interracial Jewish-Mexican couple, rarely ventures far from her home on a wealthy tree-lined street in Ottawa, where nothing ever happens. The one time she did, striking out to visit her older sister, Marnie, in Montreal, things ended in disaster as she found out that beautiful, blonde Marnie had been lying about their family’s background, trying to pass herself off as white. The fallout from that betrayal leads to a devastating accident, one that claims Alma’s arm and someone’s life.
Alma is now stuck in a holding pattern, unable to move past her grief. But Alma's life is turned upside down by an encounter just steps from home with an impossible person: the boy she watched die.
Other Evolutions is a literary debut with a dark twist that reveals the uncanny in the mundane, seeing us through the worst parts of our lives toward the weird and wonderful things right in our own backyard.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The fascinating if disjointed debut novel from short story writer Garcia (The Girl Who Cried Diamonds) charts the life of Alma Ata, a young Jewish Mexican woman living in Ottawa. Told in the first person through a collection of fragmentary flashbacks, the narrative begins with adult Alma headed to a party, then jarringly shifts to her as a child at her grandmother's funeral. After a hateful, scissor-wielding aunt attacks her, Alma runs away—right into teenage neighbor Oliver Jentsch, who shows her a grotesque perpetual-motion machine in the shape of a human hand crafted by his mysterious mother. Alma then switches gears again to introduce her older sister, Marnie, who, unlike Alma, is white-passing. Marnie invites a now 14-year-old Alma to visit her at college in Montreal but insists Alma not reveal that they're siblings. Devastated, Alma seeks out Oliver and the pair get into a car crash in which Oliver dies and Alma loses an arm. Angry and depressed, she drops out of high school. Meanwhile, Oliver's mother copes with grief by crafting a new, much stranger invention. The prose is lovely, and Garcia has a knack for capturing the surreality of loss, but the many splintering plotlines raise more questions than they answer. There's lots here to hold readers' interest, but it's a challenge to sort through.
