Home Leave

March 17, 2014
Drawing on her upbringing as a “third culture kid” (a child who grows up in a culture other than that of his or her parents), Sonnenberg delivers a sympathetic, funny debut. Elise wants to escape from her hometown in Mississippi, so when she marries Chris Kriegstein, CEO of a company whose job takes him around the world, she’s on board for globe-trotting adventure. Although Elise is at first ambivalent about motherhood, she and Chris eventually have two beloved daughters, Leah and Sophie, who grow up as much in Shanghai and Singapore as they do in the U.S. They return to the States once a year (“to remind you of what you were missing and where you were really from”), but the trip often leaves the family feeling fragmented. Then tragedy strikes, and the Kriegsteins must consider what home and family mean when there’s no real home to return to. The story spans 1885 to the present, and some of the chapters, written from multiple points of view (including that of Elise’s childhood home, Chris’s German great-grandmother, and a “we” meant to encompass the voices of all third-culture young adults), read like writing class exercises. But these continuously shifting perspectives also help convey the disorientation of the Kriegsteins’ lives, and Sonnenberg eloquently illustrates the challenges and rewards of expat life.

May 1, 2014
A tapestry of settings and voices speaks of dislocation and grief in Sonnenberg's ambitious debut.Multiple narrators-both human and inanimate-relate the story of the Kriegstein family: father Chris, who escaped Midwestern dreariness for corporate stardom; mother Elise, whose genteel Southern childhood ended abruptly with her grandfather's abuse; and their daughters, Leah and Sophie. Elise's childhood home bemoans the desolation of losing its last resident, Elise's elderly mother, Ada, to a nursing home-and the rift that arose when Ada accused Elise of "telling tales" about her grandfather. Chris' parents, reluctant assisted living residents, comment on their son's distance-emotional and geographical. From there, the narrators and points of view proliferate, ranging from deeply interior to collective and omniscient. During the first of Chris' many international postings, to Hamburg, Germany, Elise, pregnant with Leah, blunders into a bizarre winter picnic with strangers, perhaps intended to symbolize her own frozen family life, past and future. Back in the States, left alone as Chris travels, Elise is unable to muster motherly feelings for baby Leah. As teens, negotiating a difficult adjustment to life in Shanghai, Leah and Sophie are most comfortable when they can escape the expat country club and American School for summer "home leaves" with their grandparents. Early on, visits to a family therapist, presented as scenes from a play, reveal that Sophie has died suddenly-though she is still very much present, especially to Leah. Sonnenberg is particularly adept at portraying the conflicting and ambivalent feelings associated with grief: anguish, guilt, even relief (on Leah's part) that she no longer has to compete with her blonde, athletic younger sibling for her parents' or boys' attention. Since the nuclear Kriegstein family is the main focus, chapters featuring peripheral characters, though intriguing in themselves, serve only to distract. The experimental form cannot, however, distract from the lucidity of Sonnenberg's prose, which is notable for its stark honesty and sharply observed details.

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January 1, 2014

As his escalating career takes Chris Kriegstein from North America to Europe to Asia, wife Elise has morphed from shy Southern Baptist to sophisticated expat, interior decorator, and adulterer, while daughters Lean and Sophie cling desperately to each other. Sonnenberg's work has appeared in The O'Henry Prize Stories 2008.

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