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by Allison Larkin
Little River, New York, 1994: April Sawicki is living in a motorless motorhome that her father won in a poker game.
Failing out of school, picking up shifts at a local diner, she's left fending for herself in a town where she's never quite felt at home. When she "borrows" her neighbor's car to perform at an open mic night, she realizes her life could be much bigger than where she came from. After a fight with her dad, April packs her stuff and leaves for good, setting off on a journey to find a life that's all hers.
Driving without a chosen destination, she stops to rest in Ithaca. Her only plan is to survive, but as she looks for work, she finds a kindred sense of belonging at Cafe Decadence, the local coffee shop. Still, somehow, it doesn't make sense to her that life could be this easy. The more she falls in love with her friends in Ithaca, the more she can't shake the feeling that she'll hurt them the way she's been hurt. As April moves through the world, meeting people who feel like home, she chronicles her life in the songs she writes and discovers that where she came from doesn't dictate who she has to be.
This lyrical, luminous tale "is both a profound love letter to creative resilience and a reminder that sometimes even tragedy can be a kind of blessing" (Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author).
"Larkin has created a memorable character in April, whose journey toward belonging and self-acceptance will resonate with readers. The depiction of the mid-1990s is pitch-perfect and will invoke feelings of nostalgia, especially in Gen Xers who came of age during this era. Fans of Caitlin Moran's How to Build a Girl will enjoy traveling alongside April." —Booklist (starred review)
"Music and the generosity of strangers provide healing in Larkin's emotionally expansive latest… the supporting characters feel authentic, as does the sometimes harrowing depiction of April's life as a young woman traveling and performing solo night after night. This hopeful story will move readers." —Publishers Weekly
"The People We Keep is intimate, urgent and direct; April's first-person voice is magnetic, compelling… This is a novel of great empathy, about connections and coming of age, built families and self-acceptance. It contains heartbreak and redemption, and a plucky, irresistible protagonist… [A] propulsive, empathetic novel." —Shelf Awareness
"Larkin writes with brave honesty and April's story will immediately connect to your heart. I worried about April endlessly, cringed at several of her choices, and ultimately found myself cheering her on. She is a heroine you will think about long after the novel ends." —Renee Swindle, author of Shake Down the Stars
"The People We Keep is a daring, emotionally rich joy of a novel that will get in your head and grab hold of your heart. You don't just root for Allison Larkin's main character. You want to protect her. You want to reach into the pages and do whatever you can to help. Simply put, this is a great book." —Matthew Norman, author of Last Couple Standing and All Together Now
This information about The People We Keep 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.
Allison Larkin is the internationally bestselling author of the novels The People We Keep, Stay, Why Can't I Be You, and Swimming for Sunlight. Her short fiction has been published in the Summerset Review and Slice, and nonfiction in Author in Progress, a how-to guide from Writer's Digest Books, and the dog anthology I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in This Relationship. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, Jeremy, and their rescue dog, Roxy.
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