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From the acclaimed author of The Girls from Corona del Mar, a sprawling, ambitious new novel about a young father who takes his teenage daughter to Europe, hoping that an immersion in history might help them forget his past mistakes and her uncertain future.
Lucas and Katya were boarding school seniors when, blindingly in love, they decided to have a baby. Seventeen years later, after years of absence, Lucas is a weekend dad, newly involved in his daughter Vera's life. But after Vera suffers a terrifying psychotic break at a high school party, Lucas takes her to Lithuania, his grandmother's homeland, for the summer.
Here, in the city of Vilnius, Lucas hopes to save Vera from the sorrow of her diagnosis. As he uncovers a secret about his grandmother, a Home Army rebel who escaped Stutthof, Vera searches for answers of her own. Why did Lucas abandon her as a baby? What really happened the night of her breakdown? And who can she trust with the truth? Skillfully weaving family mythology and Lithuanian history with a story of mental illness, inheritance, young love, and adventure, Rufi Thorpe has written a wildly accomplished, stunningly emotional book.
BookBrowse Review
"In this quirky novel, an absent father brings his teen daughter on a history tour of Vilnius, Lithuania, as a way of bonding with his child and discovering his past. While Lithuania's history provides informative insights, and the young Vera is a compelling model of someone who teeters on the edge of mania, the whole doesn't tie up together well. This is especially so because Lucas, the father, comes across as so very lily-livered. The story swings between tours of Vilnius and that of Lucas' family. Vera too peppers the account with emails to dear Fang, her California high-school boyfriend. All in all, promising and occasionally engaging but the characters are not absorbing enough to pull the reader all the way through."
Other Reviews
"Starred Review. While the themes of the book - mania, the Holocaust, and the devastating number of ways that any parent-child dynamic can go awry - are undeniably dark, Thorpe's prose is light, often hilarious, and unshakably grounded in the concrete details of daily life... Thorpe has written an absolute winner." - Publishers Weekly
"Thorpe, the highly regarded author of The Girls from Corona del Mar (2014) sets this tale of parental guilt and teenage angst against the town's WWII past, adding true-life authenticity to an already stirring story." - Booklist
"Melancholic and whimsical at once, Thorpe's novel is bumpy, quirky, and wholly original." - Kirkus
"Dear Fang, With Love is a beautiful story about mental illness and love." - PopSugar, "26 Books You Should Read This Spring."
This information about Dear Fang, With Love was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo by Leyna Ambron
Rufi Thorpe is the author of The Knockout Queen, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award; Dear Fang, with Love; and The Girls from Corona del Mar, which was long-listed for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. A native of California, she currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.
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