A fierce debut novel about mothers and daughters, haves and have-nots, and the stark realities behind the American Dream A waitress at the Betsy Ross Diner, Elsie hopes her nickel-and-dime tips will add up to a new life. Then she meets Bashkim, who is at once both worldly and naive, a married man who left Albania to chase his dreams--and wound up working as a line cook in Waterbury, Connecticut. Back when the brass mills were still open, this bustling factory town drew one wave of immigrants after another. Now it's the place they can't seem to leave. Elsie, herself the granddaughter of Lithuanian immigrants, falls in love quickly, but when she learns that she's pregnant, Elsie can't help wondering where Bashkim's heart really lies, and what he'll do about the wife he left behind. Seventeen years later, headstrong and independent Luljeta receives a rejection letter from NYU and her first-ever suspension from school on the same day. Instead of striking out on her own in Manhattan, she's stuck in Connecticut with her mother, Elsie--a fate she refuses to accept. Wondering if the key to her future is unlocking the secrets of the past, Lulu decides to find out what exactly her mother has been hiding about the father she never knew. As she soon discovers, the truth is closer than she ever imagined. Told in equally gripping parallel narratives with biting wit and grace, Brass announces a fearless new voice with a timely, tender, and quintessentially American story. Advance praise for Brass The unforgettable mother and daughter at the center of Brass are as bright and tough as the metal itself, and Xhenet Aliu depicts their parallel journeys with equal parts grit and tenderness. Brass is a fierce, big-hearted, unflinching debut. --Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You Xhenet Aliu is ferociously talented. She's written a story so scathingly honest with characters so perfectly real, it left me breathless with admiration. There is no false sentiment here, no misplaced word, just a novel that pulses with a restless energy, a novel that pulses with life. --Cristina Henriquez, author of The Book of Unknown Americans.
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This kind of parallel mother and daughter narrative is always intriguing to me, but I felt bored and annoyed with the characters for most of the book. They make such terrible decisions and it doesn't feel realistic.
There's a strong possibility you haven't heard of Xhenet Aliu... yet. She published a little known collection four years ago, Domesticated Wild Things and Other Stories. Personally, I think it is one of the best, most well-rounded collections I've had the pleasure of reading (see my review here). Her stories were dark, yet hopeful, poetic, still simple, specific and universal—so much of what I love. So I was excited when I learned Aliu would soon publish her first novel, Brass.
Naturally, I was a little concerned if Aliu's style—so incredibly effective in short form—could be stretched out over three hundred pages. It does and it doesn't. There's a punch to Aliu's shorter stories that I looked forward to in Brass, but it never came. That's okay. Honestly, there aren't too many novels that have packed that punch, nor need to. Novels are a much more subtle form of writing and it takes an extremely dedicated and talented novelist to surprise a reader and to adequately manipulate their emotions over the length of a novel (Kazuo Ishiguro, I'm talking about you). In every other way, Brass is every bit as powerful as the stories in Aliu's collection. First and foremost, the language is simple, yet always somehow evokes higher emotions—excitement, dread, sympathy:
”... Isn't that what you want?”
I couldn't make my head move up and down in agreement, so I just rested it against his chest, listening to his heart in case it was giving anything away. It sounded like it was beating uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh, the droning pulse of a dirge, and that made me feel a little better. That dread was the same kind I felt the first time I saw Bashkim, the same kind I felt when I listened to the best minor-key ballads, and that inspired the kind of love that was easier to nurture than kudzu. It didn't even need light to grow.
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