30 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ MARCH 8, 2021
Review_FICTION
Grimmesque tale in which the beauty of
the outdoors tempts the children toward
danger. No matter the subject or setting,
Stifter’s narrators are always cataloging
the finest details of the world around
them: “I saw hosts of the little white-
yellow flowers on the ground, I saw the
greyish turf, I saw the pitch like drops of
gold on the trunks... I heard the calm
rustle in the needles.” Throughout, Stifter
sheds light on such sweeping themes as
the nature of storytelling, the legacy and
drama of ancestral history and family tra-
ditions, and mankind’s many connections
and obligations to the natural world. His
writing, freshly translated by Cole, is full
of wisdom and wonder. (May)A Door Behind a Door
Yelena Moskovich. Two Dollar Radio, $16.99
trade paper (176p) ISBN 978-1-953387-02-8
Moskovich (Virtuoso) mystifies with this
vivid story of a pair of estranged siblings
who immigrated to Milwaukee from the
Soviet Union as children in 1991. The
fragmented narrative begins with Olga
Bokuchava, who strings together images
and anecdotes from her childhood in a
Soviet apartment building, where a
neighbor, Nicky, stabbed a woman named
Oksana to death and was sent to prison.
Now in her 20s, Olga inexplicably gets a
call from Nicky, who tells Olga that her
younger brother, Moshe, with whom she
lost contact after Moshe converted to
Orthodox Judaism, is being held in some
kind of extrajudicial custody after stabbing
a young woman to death. Nicky gives her
instructions on how to help Moshe, but
before long, a pair of cops arrest Olga for
the murder. From here, the perspective
shifts to other characters, each wrapped up
in an inscrutable conspiracy. Moskovich
doesn’t explain what’s happened to Olga or
Moshe, and focuses instead on the various
characters’ states of mind, including
Oksana’s, captivating the reader with the
sense of waking from a dream and trying to
fit each hazy piece together. The dynamic
style and psychological depth make this an
engaging mind bender. Agent: David Forrer,
InkWell Management. (May)Summer on the Bluffs
Sunny Hostin. Morrow, $28.99 (400p)
ISBN 978-0-06-299417-2
The entertaining but uneven first novelsmoke ~ ring, it halos the air”) as she
explores how the complicated natures of
love, betrayal, poverty, and cultural iden-
tity affect Angel and Hannah’s relation-
ship. Readers will find this tender and
realistic portrait of first love hard to forget.
Agent: Clare Mao, Europa Content. (May)★ Motley Stones
Adalbert Stifter, trans. from the German by
Isabel Fargo Cole. New York Review Books,
$17.95 trade paper (296p) ISBN 978-1-
68137-520-5
This cycle of novellas by pioneering
nature writer Stifter (1805–1868), offers a
quiet and graceful meditation on place
and history. “Granite” features a boy in
trouble with his mother as he goes on a
mountain stroll with his grandfather,
whose tales of a historical plague dwarf
the boy’s own small misadventures. The
fabulist “Rock Crystal” follows a village
shoemaker’s two children as they meander
through a dangerous and snowy passage
in the dark, their adventure becoming aWater) reimagines Romeo & Juliet in her
wrenching debut novel in verse, set in
early 1990s New York City. The story
follows two 16-year-olds: Queens girl
Hannah, the daughter of Korean immi-
grants and a straight-A student who
spends her nights defending her mother
from Hannah’s father’s physical abuse, and
Angel, a boy of Puerto Rican descent who
lives in Brooklyn and dreams of becoming
a pilot. After meeting in the spring at a
Queens quinceañera, the two quickly fall
in love, and resolve to preserve their bond
and defend it from the judgments of their
parents and respective communities. By
summer break, Hannah’s parents disown
her over the relationship and she moves
into a cramped Bushwick apartment with
Angel. Hannah’s ethnic and family back-
ground is given somewhat richer, more
nuanced descriptions than Angel’s, but
Park’s precise, vivid verse lends a unifying
consistency, blending vernacular and
poetic expressions and song lyrics (“He
sighs & sings a Nas lyric—like a blue★ Kin
Miljenko Jergovic ́, trans. from the Croatian by Russell Scott Valentino.
Archipelago, $25 trade paper (928p) ISBN 978-1-9398-1052-6B
osnian writer Jergovic ́ (Mama Leone) pulls off an
intricate and innovative narrative encompassing
biography, history, travelogue, and fiction. In it,
Bosnian author Miljenko Jergovic ́ has lived as a
“foreigner” in Zagreb since 1993, where, as narrator, he
channels stories of Sarajevo and the ways in which the
city has embodied the 20th century’s major flash points—
religious intolerance, virulent nationalism, and world
wars. Leitmotifs and locales introduced early recirculate
throughout: Miljenko’s great-grandfather’s exile from Dubrovnik in 1920, an
ancestral house on Kasindol Street in Ilidža, a Temple where his family members and
fellow expatriates have worshiped since the 1930s, the apartment on Sepetarevac
where Miljenko grew up and lived until the war began in 1992, his grandfather’s
apiary in a village near Dražnica, work on the railroads that sustained his forefathers,
and his uncle Mladen’s death while fighting in the German army in WWII. Jergovic ́
devotes the first section to quotidian ancestral history, but even here the scope widens
with soaring chapters on the geopolitical changes after WWII, such as the prolif-
eration of German guest workers in Sarajevo from the East and West, who would
be abroad until “their countries lifted themselves up, renewed.” Miljenko’s mother’s
battle with cancer, detailed in a long metafictional section titled “Mama Ionesco,”
becomes the book’s magnetic center, and dozens of shimmering vignettes build to
the hallucinatory novella-length capstone “Sarajevo Dogs,” in which Jergovic ́ returns
in 2012 to visit his sick mother and reflect on the “city that had spit [him] out.”
Jergovic ́’s exhausting and astonishing project offers endless rewards. (May)