Brand New Human Being
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This "compelling" novel of a family in crisis offers a "realistic portrayal of trauma and its aftermath" (The Washington Post).
Stay-at-home dad Logan Pyle is holding his life together by a thread. His larger-than-life father, Gus, has just died; his wife is distant; and his kindergarten-age son has regressed to drinking from a baby bottle and sucking his thumb.
Complicating matters further is Bennie, his father's beautiful young widow—with whom Logan has a troubled past. When the thread finally snaps, Logan's actions threaten to tear the family he treasures apart.
From the author of The News from the End of the World, this "introspective and honest" novel that follows one man's journey from child to parent is "sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always a worthy, exciting read" (Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The inadequacies of the father are visited upon the son in this touching, if uneven, debut. Logan Pyle had been on track to get his American history Ph.D. when his new girlfriend, Julie, got pregnant. Now, five years into their marriage, 36-year-old Logan is a stay-at-home dad to their four-year-old son, Owen, who is having difficulties at his Montessori preschool. Julie, a "knockout" and high-powered lawyer, is consumed by her latest case, and Logan is struggling to preserve his recently deceased father's legacy, a highly-taxed "rocky rhomboid" on Missoula, Mont.'s Clark Fork Riverfront, the last remaining parcel of privately owned land. When he walks in on Julie kissing another man, Logan snaps, seizing Owen and heading on a journey that forces him to confront lingering elements of his history with his father. Compre-hending the complexities of one's father through the lens of one's own imperfect fatherhood is nothing new, but Miller explores Logan's resentments and insecurities with sensitivity and nuance. The portrayals of young Owen and particularly Julie, however, remain largely flat, leaving readers to wonder whether narrator Logan will ever see his family with as much clarity as he hopes to view his own history.
