August

February 1, 2017
A young woman returns home five years after her best friend's suicide.When they were 16, Emilia's best friend, Andrea, committed suicide. Five years have passed. Now, Emilia is living in Buenos Aires when Andrea's parents invite her back to their rural Patagonian town for a ceremony to scatter Andrea's ashes. This is the first book by Paula, an accomplished Argentinian actor, director, and writer, to be translated into English. The novel is narrated by Emilia, who addresses herself directly to Andrea (referring to "you," "your parents," "your house," and so on), and it is a lucid and vibrant account. In Buenos Aires, Andrea's death had come to seem distant, even abstract; back in their hometown, however, Emilia is faced with the truth of the death and its permanence. But she is also faced with the other particulars of the life she left behind: her father with his new wife and new kids (Emilia's mother left her family when she was a child); and Emilia's former lover has moved on, as well. Emilia is a chatty narrator, and her account is crammed with pop-culture references, slang, mild cursing, and the kind of repetitive, obsessive thought processes familiar to anyone who's lived through their early 20s. You can practically hear her talking out loud. Here she is soon after her arrival at Andrea's house: "Anyway, so dinner with your parents was great, albeit with me performing acrobatics the entire time in order to avoid or not broach certain topics. Basically they asked about my life in Buenos Aires, if I liked it, if I'd adapted, who I was hanging out with there...they asked if I was happy with my job, and here I edited a little bit and told them just about the good stuff," and on, and on. It's an engaging, frequently moving story, and its only fault is that we don't hear more about Andrea and the specifics of her death. In contrast, there's a great deal of focus on Julian, Emilia's ex-boyfriend, which eventually becomes tiresome. Paula's English-language debut is almost impossible to put down: moody, atmospheric, at times cinematic, her novel is indicative of a fresh and fiery talent with, hopefully, more to come.

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Starred review from March 1, 2017
My life is not what one would term heroic, says 21-year-old Emilia. She might have a point. After all, even though Emi is enrolled in college in Buenos Aires, and living with her boyfriend, Manuel, she is merely going through the motions of life. Losing her close childhood friend to suicide makes the young woman even more rudderless. Paula's English-language debut tracks Emi's return to her native Esquel, in picturesque Patagonia, to visit her deceased friend's parents. It is in this small town that Emi must make peace with her pastreflecting about life and love even as she is jolted out of her inertia upon meeting Juli, her ex-boyfriend, now married and with kids. She questions her reasons for departing for the big city and wonders if she's following a well-worn path simply because others have been here before. Though the central themes might be melancholic, Paula's treatment is incisive and far from a monotone. There's plenty of nuance, and even dollops of humor, here. The Argentinian countryside is a picturesque backdrop for Emi's peregrinations, its vastness a subtle metaphor for her confusion. Fluently translated from the Spanish, this absorbing novel with a Holdenesque narrator delivers a raw and arresting new voice in literature.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)