Hold Still

December 7, 2015
Strong’s debut novel features some familiar elements—an unhappy academic family (in Park Slope), children flailing, one spouse emotionally distant, the other tempted by a student—but it is saved by the convincing emotional gymnastics of Maya Taylor. An English professor and overbearing mother, Maya tumbles fully-clothed into the ocean to rescue her young daughter, Ellie, from a wave in the foreshadowing first chapter. “I’m fine,” her daughter says, although the reader always suspects this isn’t true. From then on, the chapters shift between present and past: a present where Ellie is away from home, recovering from a vaguely alluded-to tragedy, and the past, where Ellie has begun to spiral out of control toward the mistake that will unravel her and her family. Meanwhile, her brother flounders through his freshman year, and her parents drift further apart. Ellie’s instability is the narrative locus, and the portrayal of teenage addiction occasionally feels unconvincing and melodramatic, as does the puppy-dog rendering of Charles, Maya’s adoring and one-dimensional TA. What keeps the pages turning is the desperate, botched attempts at familial love between family members, none of whom seem to know quite what they want, bringing to mind the Tolstoy quote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Here, the mercurial rendering of this particular unhappy family makes it a heart-wrenching read in its very own way. Agent: Amelia Atlas, ICM Partners.

January 1, 2016
Strong's debut novel traces a mother-daughter bond that must be rebuilt after a life-changing tragedy. College professors Stephen and Maya Taylor have made a lovely life for themselves, commuting from tree-lined Brooklyn to teach philosophy and English at Columbia University. As their children, Ellie and Ben, grow closer to adulthood, the family seems to hang by a thread. After years of Ellie using drugs, making mistakes, and sleeping with the wrong boys, Maya ships her away to Florida to care for an old friend's child. Maya, an unmothered mother who coped with the pressures of parenting by reading, locking herself in her office, and running the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan for what seems like "half the day," no longer sleeps with her husband. Stephen's patience is tried by Ben's announcement that he's giving up his soccer scholarship and taking a break from college. The novel alternates between Ellie in 2011 and Maya in 2013, a before-and-after exploration of what tragedy and mistakes can do to families and friendships. Ellie's bad habits follow her to Florida and result in irrevocable loss. The accident, which is not elaborated on until the final pages, seems anticlimactic after being alluded to throughout the novel. Though Ellie's mistake is the lynchpin of the book, most of the story unpacks Maya's life--her absent mother, her emotionally unstable father, her career, her marriage, her closest friendship, and a web of relationships with graduate students. Ellie's brief but sweet relationship with her mother's friend and former student Annie is warmly drawn but leaves readers wishing Ellie was the subject of the same deep character analysis Maya received. A family drama that illustrates trauma's reverberations beyond those directly involved.

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January 1, 2016
Behind any life-changing decision is a cascade of choices leading up to it. For Ellie, those choices led her down a troubled path of drugs and partying, until her abdication of responsibility caused a reckoning that no one could have prepared for. Her mother, Maya, an English professor with a propensity to hide in her books rather than face real life, struggles to connect with her wayward daughter as well as her distant husband and, until recently, dependable son. The narrative bounces back and forth between the period shortly before Ellie's pivotal action, revealing the circumstances surrounding it and the consequences that came from it. Strong brilliantly captures the significance that unmade decisions can have on a life, and her study of the relationship between mother and daughter is nuanced and heavy with their history. The fact that Ellie's voice is almost entirely absent in the chapters after the event serves to heighten the tension and distance between the two. Introspective and intricately plotted, Hold Still considers what remains after a devastating event changes everything.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)