July 1, 2013
Two sisters from a remote Croatian island called Rosmarina form a core of family drama in this first novel from Brkic (Stillness). Magdalena, the elder sister and a schoolteacher, leads a Spartan, practically celibate life in her childhood room; while Jadranka is an unpredictable redhead who is starting to feel like "a fish that merely traveled the circumference of its bowl." When the sisters' American cousin Katarina unexpectedly invites Jadranka to live in New York City, several generations' worth of secrets begin to unravel: among them, what happened to the girls' long-presumed-dead Uncle Marin, and the uncertainty of Jadranka's parentage. Brkic handles the logistics of multi-generational intrigue adroitly, and her prose is thoughtful and careful, if overly restrained. The novel is underwhelming, however, as it doesn't begin to wield any emotional heft until the last 100 pages or so, when Jadranka's abrupt disappearance from Katarina's Manhattan apartment prompts her mother and sister to fly to NY to look for her. Brkic juggles too many perspectives and gets bogged down in back-story, when the present-day action and the fraught triangle between the sisters and their estranged mother Ana is what is most absorbing.
May 1, 2013
The bonds of kinship and homeland confine but endure in this debut novel from short story author and memoirist Brkic (The Stone Fields, 2004, etc.). Magdalena is so attached to Rosmarina, the remote Croatian island that is her family's ancestral home, that she could not leave it even for her true love, Damir, a journalist who now roams the globe without her. She was so traumatized by the dreadful year she and her younger sister Jadranka spent on the mainland with their mother, Ana, and her brutal second husband that she is content to remain a spinster schoolteacher and tend her aging grandparents. But the disappearance of Jadranka, a gifted artist who had gone to visit a cousin in New York City, prompts her sister to begin an odyssey that uncovers some ugly secrets about their family and the agonized history of the former Yugoslavia. Brkic's well-crafted narrative intersperses Magdalena's quest with the memories of both sisters, as well as those of their dying grandfather, a partisan during World War II, and of Ana and her brother Marin, who fled to America with the cousin's family during the oppressive heyday of Yugoslavia's communist regime. We learn fairly soon that Magdalena's father may have committed suicide after learning of Ana's infidelity with a feared local policeman, but it will take the rest of the novel for a tangled web of loyalty and betrayals to unravel enough to reveal the complex motivations behind these acts and many others. The final chapters feature several moving reconciliations affirming the power of love and forgiveness to overcome long-festering traumas, but the closing pages quietly remind us that such reunions can't necessarily heal every wound or change a person's destiny. A few unnecessarily melodramatic plot twists only slightly mar a sensitive tale of deep emotional force.
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December 1, 2012
Brkic's a special writer whose works hit me right in the heart; her story collection, Stillness, was a Barnes & Noble Discover pick, a Chicago Tribune best book, and a Whiting Award winner. So take a good look at her first novel, whose heroine must set out to New York from the remote Croatian island where she lives to find her free-spirited sister. Instead, she uncovers some family darkness. In-house raves.
Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from May 1, 2013
Luka, the patriarch of a family of fishermen living on the Croatian island of Rosmarina, taught everyone to swim, establishing a first rule with a profound implication Stay afloat. A place of commanding beauty and painful memories in the wake of war and Communist oppression, Rosmarina calls to Luka even after he falls into a coma, though his daughter, Ana, flees the island in anger with her young daughters, Magdalena and Jadranka. As in her story collection, Stillness (2003), and memoir, The Stone Fields (2004), Whiting Award winner Brkic draws on her Croatian heritage and Bosnian war experiences in her sinuous and suspenseful first novel as she tracks the paths of solitary teacher Magdalena, who becomes firmly anchored to Rosmarina, and elusive artist Jadranka, who, with her shimmering, red-haired beauty, resembles no one else in the family and changes everyone's lives by going to New York City and clandestinely searching for their missing uncle. In her exquisitely crafted, superbly structured novel, Brkic summons undertones of Greek tragedy to create her arresting characters and their intense emotions and dire secrets. By dramatizing nuanced questions of who is at fault, who can be trusted, and who will sink or swim, Brkic reveals persistent, multigenerational wounds of war, sacrifice, exile, and longing and imagines how healing might commence.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)