The White Hot
A Novel
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
The story of a runaway mother’s ten days of freedom—and the pain, desire, longing, and wonder we find on the messy road to enlightenment—from Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegría Hudes.
“The White Hot has the effect of pressing your hand to a barbed live wire. April’s is one of the most memorable voices I’ve encountered in recent fiction. . . . [A] brilliant depiction of a woman learning to transform her rage into something resembling transcendence.”—The New York Times Book Review
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, OPRAH DAILY, KIRKUS REVIEWS, BOOKPAGE
April is a young mother raising her daughter in an intergenerational house of unspoken secrets and loud arguments. Her only refuge is to hide away in a locked bathroom, her ears plugged into an ambient soundscape, and a mantra on her lips: dead inside. That is, until one day, as she finds herself spiraling toward the volcanic rage she calls the white hot, a voice inside her tells her to just . . . walk away. She wanders to a bus station and asks for a ticket to the furthest destination; she tells the clerk to make it one-way. That ticket takes her from her Philly home to the threshold of a wilderness and the beginning of a nameless quest—an accidental journey that shakes her awake, almost kills her, and brings her to the brink of an impossible choice.
The White Hot takes the form of a letter from mother to daughter about a moment of abandonment that would stretch from ten days to ten years—an explanation, but not an apology. Hudes narrates April’s story—spiritual and sexy, fierce and funny—with delicate lyricism and tough love. Just as April finds in her painful and absurd sojourn the key to freeing herself and her family from a cage of generational trauma, so Hudes turns April’s stumbling pursuit of herself into an unforgettable short epic of self-discovery.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A woman leaves behind everything, including her daughter, in this intense novel. As a young mother, April tried raising her daughter, Noelle, in an intergenerational house. After feeling an increasing rage bubbling up and uncontrollably simmering over, April decided to walk away. She wasn’t meant to be gone long, just a few hours or maybe a day, but she finds that more days pass as she tries to find her own kind of enlightenment. Writing a letter to her daughter to read when she turns 18, April attempts to explain and justify her actions. This emotionally raw tale is an absolute powerhouse. We were completely gripped by the sharp and lyrical prose which confronts many powerful themes, including generational trauma, racism, domestic violence, and teen pregnancy. It’s a searingly honest and confessional look at motherhood and survival, which many people will be able to relate to. This is a deeply moving, unflinching read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The potent debut novel from playwright and memoirist Hudes (My Broken Language) follows a single mother who abandons her daughter to try and find herself. The story takes the form of a letter written by April Soto, 26, to her 10-year-old daughter, Noelle, which Noelle is meant to read when she turns 18. The mother and daughter live with April's mother and grandmother in Philadelphia, and April plans to leave Noelle there for 10 days to clear her head and rid herself of the "white hot," a seething rage that regularly washes over her, due in part to the burden of childcare and her dead-end job. April spends several days in Pittsburgh before heading back east, determined to confront Noelle's father, who abandoned her when she was pregnant. Early on, the reader learns that April has been missing from Noelle's life ever since she left, and Noelle is now reading the letter as she's about to finish high school. The end of April's letter is gut-wrenching, but the novel offers profound clarity, particularly in how it traces the roots of April's anger and restlessness to her grandmother's migration from Puerto Rico in the 1980s and other generational traumas ("My anger had launched a voyage and voyages were my birthright"). This sizzles.
