Porcupines
For readers of Katherine Heiny and Curtis Sittenfeld, a dazzling debut about mothers, daughters, and belonging
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
‘A dazzling mother-daughter story’ Jenny Jackson, author of Pineapple Street
'Funny, acerbic, and wonderfully playful: a novel to sink into' NAOMI WOOD, author of Mrs. Hemingway
'Destined to become an instant classic. Richly drawn characters in an immigrant journey as old as America herself' ADRIANA TRIGIANI, author of The View From Lake Como
Los Angeles, 2001. Sonia is raising her daughter, Mila, alone in the sunny but somnolent suburbs of LA. Her days are a blur of not-quite-illegal business activities, avoiding other moms, and baking birthday cakes laced with rum: minor mistakes that nevertheless remind her she doesn’t belong.
Mila, meanwhile, is juggling violin and swimming lessons and navigating the treacherous social politics of school – all the while trying to get her mother to share something, anything, about her past.
But there are just too many things that Mila doesn’t know:
She doesn’t know that her mother grew up in Soviet Hungary (where getting your hands on a banana was one of the greatest thrills in life)She doesn’t know that her mother has a sister called Rina (whom she hasn’t spoken to in 10 years)The only thing she does know about her father is that he was a ‘good time’ (according to her mother)Crucially, she doesn’t know that there is a very good reason why her mother dodges everyone, from traffic cops to vice principals.
So, Mila concocts a scheme to get her mother, and the man Mila is kind of sure must be her father to reconnect. It involves corralling Sonia into chaperoning an orchestra of ten-year-olds (most of whom seem to be called Megan) on a road trip from LA to San Francisco, and it may just cause their carefully constructed lives to implode.
Moving between Budapest before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Washington, DC in the tense years of the Cold War and the bright sunshine of early 2000s Los Angeles, Porcupines is an irresistible novel about mothers and daughters, belonging and reinvention, the things we carry with us, and those we tell ourselves we’ve left behind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this delightfully droll debut from Fabriczki, a quirky mother and daughter find their footing in Los Angeles as the latter gradually learns the truth of their origins. When Sonia drops her daughter Mila off for her first day of elementary school in 1996, she instructs her in what to say: "We live about a five minutes' drive away, your mother works at an office, and you're not Russian." Sonia, who buys American goods for resale in Eastern Europe, rarely discusses her early life. Despite their closeness, Mila knows nothing of her mother's upbringing or her father's identity. Five years later, Mila finds out her mother regularly emails a man named Anthony, and she hatches a scheme to meet him during a fifth grade band trip to San Francisco. She has no idea that her mom's history with Anthony started when 18-year-old Sonia, then Szonja, flew from her native Hungary to California to spend the summer with her married sister, Rina. Szonja and her sister have little in common, and, feeling like a scolded child in her home, Szonja pulls away. The charm here is in Fabriczki's character work, which takes on increasing depth as she alternates between 2001 and chapters focused on Szonja in 1989, slowly revealing what led to Sonia's life as a single mother. This sharp-witted immigrant story is full of surprises.
