The summer of 1978, ten-year-old Vicki Anderson rides her bike to the local park and goes missing. Her tight-knit blue-collar Pennsylvania neighborhood, where children roam the streets at night playing lightning tag, aboveground pools sparkle in backyards, and flowers scent the air, will never be the same.
Down the street from Vicki’s house, another family is in crisis. Troubled by her past, headstrong Natalia Kisch has abandoned her husband and two daughters for another man. Frank Kisch, grappling with his anger, is left to raise their girls alone, oblivious to his daughters’ struggles with both disappearances: Eva, seventeen, plunges into an affair with her married high school teacher, and nine-year-old Sissy escapes to a world of imagination and storytelling that becomes so magical it pierces the reality of the everyday.
When Natalia unexpectedly returns, the struggles and tensions that have built over the summer erupt into a series of events that change the Kisches irrevocably—forcing them to piece together their complicated pasts and commitments to each other.
In this haunting, atmospheric debut, Sandra Novack examines loss, loyalty, and a family in crisis. Lyrical and elegiac, Precious illuminates our attempts to make sense of the volatility that surrounds and consumes us, and explores our ability, even during the most trying times, to remember and hold on to those we love most.
*Starred Review* Trouble simmers beneath the surface of a bucolic Pennsylvania town in Novack’s dramatic, elegantly rendered debut. The novel opens in the mid-1970s, with beleaguered housewife Natalia Kisch about to run away to Italy with a neighborhood doctor, leaving her husband, Frank, and daughters Sissy and Eva behind. The girls are both at precarious stages in their lives: 9-year-old Sissy spends her days in a dream world, and 17-year-old Eva talks back, bares her body in skimpy clothes, and beds local boys. At a loss as to how to deal with them, Frank leaves the girls home alone much too much. Then, shortly after Natalia leaves, Sissy’s onetime best friend, Vicki, disappears from the local playground. Hope dwindles after months of futile searching. Smaller dramas occur in the shadow of the larger one, as Eva begins an affair with a local high-school English teacher, and Frank loses his job. Then Natalia reappears, hoping to redeem herself and repair her broken family. But she returns to a town worn down by worry and grief. Short story writer Novack has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. In this accomplished first novel, she writes tellingly of the complex relationships among families, lovers, and friends. --Allison Block
Sandra Novack is the author of PRECIOUS and EVERYONE BUT YOU. Download a FREE story from EVERYONE BUT YOU, here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/57487337/Fireflies-by-Sandra-Novack
EVERYONE BUT YOU:
A 2011 Chicago Tribune Pick for Best Chicago-area books.
"The rawness and honesty of Sandra Novack's Everyone But You is exemplified by its artfully crafted characters. Whether it be through the dying wife and-mother in "Ants" or the idle, suspicious writer of "Save My Soul", we are exposed to the intimate workings of the narrators' minds. In this place, complex webs of doubt and regret are ultimately tempered with the blatant and beautiful contradictions of words spoken." San Francisco Book Review
"Novack's keen eye for nuances of family behavior and for the internal contradictions most people live with carries many of these numerous, fast-reading tales." Associated Press
"A diverting blend of plaintive sex and literary references." NY Times
"Novack follows her lauded debut, Precious (2009), with an electrifying collection of sexy, gutsy, imaginatively compassionate stories. Her female characters are frank and assertive, even when they're clueless, and Novack writes equally convincingly from a man's point of view. Vividly tactile, funny, irreverent, and incisive, these stories of imperiled relationships are also richly plotted. In the blisteringly funny and tough "Fireflies," a hot number calling herself Lola picks up a guy named Harold as they watch a used-car lot go up in flames, ultimately teaching him a thing or two about the treacheries of love and the persistence of class divides. The arrival, via priority mail, of her long-estranged, now-deceased father's wooden leg jolts a young woman into awareness of how empty her casual sexual conquests are. In "White Trees in Summer," an elderly man who helped his acutely suffering wife die is harassed by teenagers. Novack's keen and spirited tales delve into the crazy and cruel situations we helplessly devise and marvel over how unfathomable we are to each other and ourselves." -- Booklist, Donna Seaman
A Reader's Digest Recommends Book: Everyone But You In Everyone But You, Sandra Novack's first collection of short stories (her novel, Precious, was published in 2009), she gives the subject of relationships a good going-over. Human affairs--be they among family, friends or lovers--are usually fraught in these tales, yet their tension can be magnetic. Oddly skewed and unpredictable, the narratives feature people who are often stubbornly unconscious of their own needs and desires, yet vulnerable enough that they are mostly sympathetic. In "Fireflies," a impetuous, unknowable woman wreaks havoc on the life of a young man struggling to find his way. In "White Trees in Summer," after an old woman dies, misunderstandings break out between her neighbors, local teenagers, and the elderly husband she has left a widower. Connections falter between people, even as they try to do their best. These scenarios could add up to a failure of storytelling if Novack's characters weren't as intriguing as they are confounding. Booklist wrote that the Everyone is an "...[electrifying collection of sexy, gutsy, imaginatively compassionate stories. Vividly tactile, funny, irreverent, and incisive, these stories of imperiled relationships are also richly plotted." - Review by Barbara O'Dair, Executive Editor, Reader's Digest Magazine
"Novack is fascinating by those on the edge: of insanity, of break-ups, of self-discovery fraught with acute pain." - Publishers Weekly
Praise for PRECIOUS: A BOOKLIST Top Ten Debut of 2009, Precious is now a Fall 2010 "Reader's Circle Selection" and is available in paperback from Random House, 8/31.
"Heralded by Booklist as one of the ten best debut novels of 2009, reviewers compared PRECIOUS to the works of Anne Tyler and Joyce Carol Oates, and called the novel compelling and beautifully written. Critically acclaimed author Novack has a natural, lyrical voice, and her setting is wonderfully atmospheric. With its focus on relationships between sisters, mother and daughter, and husband and wife, PRECIOUS has great discussion potential and will appeal widely to book clubs." -Random House Reader's Circle
Reviews for PRECIOUS "Sandra Novack's PRECIOUS is surprising, partly because it never becomes what it appears to be--a novel about a missing child--but rather brilliantly develops into a powerful story about another family in full-tilt crisis. It is surprising as only the best debut fiction can be, showing a new writer already in full command of her gifts." -Teresa Weaver, Atlanta Magazine
"[A] lyrical and finely crafted first novel...The graceful prose and bleak atmosphere underscore the loneliness of each character. Novack takes the massive distance between friends, husbands and wives, and makes it her home." --Publishers Weekly(12/8/08)
"[A] dramatic, elegantly rendered debut. In this accomplished first novel, she [Novack:] writes tellingly of the complex relationships among families, lovers, and friends.--Booklist (Starred review) (2/1/09)
"Known for her incisive short stories, published in literary journals like the Iowa Review, Novack has written a haunting first novel... Told with emotional honesty and a unique grasp of the sometimes searing complexity of human relationships, this novel manages also to convey some depth about the very randomness of life and fate."--Library Journal (1/15/09)
"...The characters come alive in the details. Every tragedy is inevitable in Novack's precise, often beautiful debut." --Kirkus Reviews (12/15/08)
"Precious has everything I want in a novel. The Kisch family--and really, all of the people who inhabit this wonderful book--seem so real that I feel I've literally met them. The everyday setting is made haunting by the heart-stopping plot and by the novel's exact and understated prose. This is a novel about an era, a world, and a neighborhood, but at its core, it's about a family struggling to understand, and to be understood."--Laura Moriarty, author of The Rest of Her Life
"Precious is a powerful, gracefully written, subtly startling work of art." - Huntington News
"Suffused with grief and an unsettling coolly observed nostalgia." - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"The novel's narrative richness and focused energy baffle conventional expectations, and Novack's frequent use of the present tense adds a chilling sense of urgency to her tale, driven as much by character as plot." - Morning Call/Chicago Tribune
"Novack engineers her plot so flawlessly that the reader is swept up in the flow of the story. Her fine writing holds your attention...you want to know what is going to happen to these people." - The Baton Rouge Advocate
"A sense of foreboding lies beneath the lazy summer suburban surface of their [the characters'] lives...Novack infuses the suspense of a thriller into her close observation of a domestic drama." - The Columbus Dispatch
"Exquisitely written, Precious is about all the vanishings in our lives--family, love, trust--and the stories we tell ourselves and each other to fill the subsequent holes left in our hearts. So haunting I haven't been able to forget a syllable of it, Precious isn't just spectacularly special--it's truly one knockout punch of a debut."--Caroline Leavitt, author of Girls in Trouble
"Precious exposes the connections of fearful hope and weighs the cost and ultimate endurance of love. Written with compassion and grave grace, this lyrical, nuanced book establishes Novack as a significant novelist from whom we will hear much more."--Erin McGraw, author of The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard
"Like Natalia, just one of the unforgettable characters in this novel, Sandra Novack understands 'the small, complicated spaces that exist between people.' But she also understands, as Natalia learns to, how people can close those spaces, how they can return home to a love they thought was lost. This is a beautifully written, moving, and wise novel from one of the best new writers to come along in years."--David Jauss, author of Black Maps.
This review is from: Precious: A Novel (Hardcover)
When Natalia Kisch does the unthinkable, leaving husband and two daughters behind to run off with her boss to Italy, she sets off a chain of events that unleashes the fury of the fates. Left behind in their small 1970s Pennsylvania town are husband, Frank, and two daughters, Sissy, nine, and Eve, seventeen. Consumed by their own pain and confusion, each member of the family retreats inward, Frank to his rage, Eve to a consuming, anger-fueled rebellion and Sissy retreating to world of fantasy. Soon after, when ten-year-old Vicki disappears from a local playground, the town is stunned by a sudden violence they have never experienced, thought meant for other people, other towns. Charging their children to stay away from the park where Vicki went missing, the neighbors withdraw, watchful, as winter yields to summer. Through the long months since Natalia carried her suitcase out the door, from a joyless Christmas to the heat-drenched days of July and August, the family drifts into a weary routine, Eva resenting the need to care for Sissy, Frank unable to reach his oldest daughter.
Novack travels this shattered landscape with a sensitivity to things lost and found, the fragile wings of childhood trampled by one woman's fateful decision in a moment when her life seems unbearable. The lesson is painful: There are consequences for our actions. Of Romany descent, Natalia has always fed Sissy's insatiable curiosity with stories, tales that haunt the child during her mother's absence. Eve, on the cusp of adulthood, has nearly left behind the cares of youth; now she is confused, unsure, her provocative, blooming beauty a temptation to a man who should know better. And the silent Frank, unable to cope either before or after his wife leaves, retreats to his classic Chevy, spending endless hours avoiding the realities of his life. With a critical part of the family missing, there is no safe harbor, no rest, not even for Natalia, who realizes the enormity of her mistake, worrying if there will still be a place for her in a home where the rooms are crowded with anger.
Once begun, the story accelerates with the ferocity of a runaway train, unstoppable, each character tenderly brought to a precipice, their fears, needs and hopes in suspension, unable to mend what has been broken. This subtle indictment of self-absorbed parents is written in prose that is at times stunning, others weighted with raw emotion as Natalia's children struggle to define their changed world. As the neighbors gossip about the grieving woman whose child has disappeared and who drinks to excess, the air in the Kisch's house trembles with crisis, rage and unpredictability. Even Natalia's return cannot save her family, caught in a roiling emotional conflict with no focus, each character desperate to survive a wash of feelings grown out of control. In the end, the world will have its way, Novack's powerful, stinging novel a reminder of the frailty of all we take for granted and the terrible price of lies and betrayal, forgiveness just out of reach. Luan Gaines/2009.
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This review is from: Precious: A Novel (Hardcover)
I love good metaphors, and here were so many. I don't read often enough, but this book took me 2 days to finish. I had to know what happened. And the characters were so honest, that at the end, I had the overwhelming desire to search for them on Facebook to see what they were doing now and to see if they were ok.
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This review is from: Precious: A Novel (Hardcover)
The depth of Ms. Novack's soul and heart must be so large as to be immeasurable because surely one cannot write a story like this one with anything less. This novel had me sobbing not just at the end, but also in the middle at the most unexpected times. Novack is a writer who understands the power of connecting emotionally to her reader.
"Precious" is the story of what happens to a family when a little girl goes missing in their small town. But while the disappearance hangs heavy in the periphery, a storm is raging within the Kisch family. And journeying through that storm, one learns just how vulnerable a child's (and teen's) limited understanding of the adult world makes her. The aftermath leaves no one untouched, including this reader.
I was impressed with Novack's technical ability: lovely, exciting, elegant sentences that weave the tale, seemingly effortless, from start to finish; masterful handling of the omniscient pov; and brilliantly carved characters.
Reading this book was a rewarding and gut-wrenching Experience. I cannot wait to read another by this extremely talented author.
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