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by Sandra Novack
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, above ground 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.
"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.
"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.
"In the hands of Novack, these echoes are as inexorable as tides, and they permeate this book with a deep sadness. Although the pacing is slow, the characters come alive in the details." - Kirkus Reviews.
"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 it's core, it's about a family struggling to understand, and to be understood.”–Laura Moriarty, author of The Rest of Her Life.
"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.
This information about Precious 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.
Sandra Novack's fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, and Mississippi Review, among other publications. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times, and holds an MFA from Vermont College. Novack currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband, Phil, and many animals.
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