Precious

December 8, 2008
Novack's lyrical and finely crafted first novel is set in a small, idyllic Pennsylvania town circa 1978 and charts the crumbling of two families. At the center of the novel is the Kisch family, sisters Sissy and Eva and parents Frank and Natalia. Nine-year-old Sissy is introverted and impressionable, while older Eva is having an affair with Peter, her high school English teacher. Her parents' marriage, too, is rapidly deteriorating, and soon Natalia takes off for Italy with her lover, leaving Frank to try to deal with the remnants of their family. A few houses away, 10-year-old Vicki Anderson (whose relationship to Sissy is troubled), has gone missing, leaving her mother, Ginny, panicked and grief-stricken. Unhappiness, it seems, dwells everywhere, though there may be a dash of hard-won hope as Natalia returns home and the Kisches recalibrate. Ginny, meanwhile, fails to receive any good news about her missing daughter. The graceful prose and bleak atmosphere underscore the loneliness of each character. Novack takes the massive distance between friends, husbands and wives, and makes it her home.

January 15, 2009
Known for her incisive short stories, published in literary journals like the "Iowa Review", Novack has written a haunting first novel in which a girl's disappearance from a small town in 1970s Pennsylvania forms the backdrop for a family's coping with loss and remorse. When Sissy Kisch learns that her former best friend, ten-year-old Vickie Anderson, never returned home one summer evening from the local park, she feels guilty about having been mad at her. Compounding Sissy's regret is that her own restless mother is absent from the family home. With her mother gone, Sissy is under the care of her teenage sister, Eva, who tries to provide some comfort but is herself directionless and angry. Together, the two girls struggle with their father's constant irritability and often uncommunicative manner. When Sissy's mother suddenly returns, feelings among this family are not easily mended, just as an explanation for Vickie's disappearance remains elusive. Told with emotional honesty and a unique grasp of the sometimes searing complexity of human relationships, this novel manages also to convey some depth about the very randomness of life and fate. Recommended for all public library fiction collections.M. Neville, Trenton P.L., NJ

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2009
Trouble simmers beneath the surface of a bucolic Pennsylvania town in Novacks dramatic, elegantly rendered debut. The novel opens in the mid-1970s, with beleaguered housewife Natalia Kisch about to run away to Italy with a neighborhood doctor, leaving her husband, Frank, and daughters Sissy and Eva behind. The girls are both at precarious stages in their lives: 9-year-old Sissy spends her days in a dream world, and 17-year-old Eva talks back, bares her body in skimpy clothes, and beds local boys. At a loss as to how to deal with them, Frank leaves the girls home alone much too much. Then, shortly after Natalia leaves, Sissys onetime best friend, Vicki, disappears from the local playground. Hope dwindles after months of futile searching. Smaller dramas occur in the shadow of the larger one, as Eva begins an affair with a local high-school English teacher, and Frank loses his job. Then Natalia reappears, hoping to redeem herself and repair her broken family. But she returns to a town worn down by worry and grief. Short story writer Novack has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. In this accomplished first novel, she writes tellingly of the complex relationships among families, lovers, and friends.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)