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A tragicomic, intimate American story of two precocious sisters coming of age during the Midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s.
Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents' volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to cope in these antagonistic conditions, questioning the American Dream as the rest of the country abandons their community in crisis.
As Jo and Bernie's imaginative solutions for escape come up short against their parents' realities, the family leaves their farm for Chicago, where Joanne—free-spirited, reckless, and unable to tame her inner violence—rebels in increasingly desperate ways. After her worst breakdown yet, Jo goes into exile in Deadhorse, Alaska, and it is up to Bernadette to use all she's learned from her sister to revive a sense of hope against the backdrop of a failing world.
With her debut novel, Nora Lange has crafted a rambunctious, ambitious, and heart-rending portrait of two idiosyncratic sisters, determined to persevere despite the worst that capitalism and their circumstances has to throw at them.
"Lange's debut novel is a refreshingly sardonic take on the decaying ideal of the American dream, with an anti-capitalist tilt. At the end of it all, this is not just a brilliant bildungsroman: Like the classics that the Fareown sisters quote ad infinitum, it's a lush, uncanny mythology itself." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] resonant debut...Lange's lucid story digs deep into the bonds of family and the alliances that are formed and retained across time and despite changing circumstances. Readers will be captivated." —Publishers Weekly
"Lange's achingly stylish prose, brutal humor, and ferocious wit set this novel apart—she captures the tender and complex ways that growing up and growing older can impact sisterhood." —LitHub
"Us Fools is one of those special books that reorders the world and makes everything new again — language, family, history, fear, love. Nora Lange writes with the precision of Joy Williams, and the heart of George Saunders, in a voice that is all her own. You won't forget this novel." —Daniel Alarcón, author of At Night We Walk in Circles
"With wild dreams and tender considerations, Nora Lange's Us Fools brings us that bond most tangled, mysterious, eternal and dazzlingly reflective: sisters. As farms and families spin, what center holds when the world lets go?" —Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark
"There is something of the end of America in Nora Lange's portrait of a farming family on a wild and anfractuous path to the brink of collapse. At turns hallucinatory and ruminative, fans of Joy Williams will find a familiar in Lange's sharp-witted prose." —Amelia Gray, author of Isadora
This information about Us Fools 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.
Nora Lange's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, Hazlitt, Joyland, American Short Fiction, Denver Quarterly, HTMLGiant, LIT, The Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. Her project Dailyness was longlisted for the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers. She received her MFA from Brown University's Literary Arts Program where she was a Kaplan Fellow, and will be a 2024 fellow at the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. An earlier iteration of Us Fools was shortlisted for The Novel Prize in 2020, a prize to recognize and publish novels that explore and expand the possibilities of the form. She lives in Los Angeles, California.
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