We Are Called to Rise

April 28, 2014
In her debut novel, McBride introduces us chapter by chapter to a disparate group of Las Vegans. Among them are Avis, whose husband Jim has just left her for another woman, and their son, Nate, a troubled veteran of the Iraq War who has returned to join a craven Vegas police department and who has begun to abuse his young wife. We also meet Bashkim, an Albanian immigrant boy whose unassimilated parents barely survive selling ice cream from a truck; another veteran named Luis, who is hospitalized after a suicide attempt, and with whom Bashkim begins corresponding as part of a school project; and various other school officials and charitable folk who, for better or worse, are trying to help sort things out. The story builds tension as the lives of these people unfold, intersecting in violent and catastrophic circumstances. But McBride’s characters are warm with pulsing vitality, their interior struggles as dramatic as the painful events that will alter each of their paths. The narrative is compelling enough to draw the reader along, even as it skips from one character’s point of view to another. And it is a testament to the author’s mature voice and storytelling talent that we are willing to take to heart the lessons her story offers. Agent: Stephanie Cabot, Gernert Company.

May 15, 2014
This first novel has a stronger focus on falling than rising but casts struggle in a noble light.Four voices narrate the story, set in residential Las Vegas. Avis, 50-something, is witnessing the unexpected end of her marriage and the volatile changes in her son, Nate, who has recently returned from his third tour in Iraq and is about to become a police officer. Next we meet Roberta, a seasoned court-appointed advocate for children who ruminates on past cases, the city of Las Vegas and its rarely seen underprivileged side. Bashkim, 8 years old, lives with his baba and nene, Albanian refugees who run an ice cream truck. He loves school, his nene and his little sister, but his baba is a paranoid former political prisoner who beats his wife and makes Bashkim anxious. Finally, Specialist Luis Rodriguez-Reyes wakes up in Walter Reed hospital, injured and traumatized after losing his best friend in Afghanistan. The pertinent details in all these lives are brutal ones, and the events that eventually bind them together, even more so. McBride has a talent for voice; her characters are easy to distinguish from each other and equally realistic, despite their dissimilarity. She's also a stickler for procedure, which can be dry but adds depth to some aspects of the tale, particularly Bashkim's schooling and Luis' recovery process. The theme of tragedy, specifically why bad things happen to good people and why good people can do bad things, is heavy-handed, though the novel is stocked with kind, professional, intuitive secondary characters who go a small way toward balancing out the horror. Arguably, the book's fifth protagonist is Las Vegas; many passages are bittersweet love letters to what it's like to make a regular life and raise a family there.Though ardently told, this novel takes on more issues than it can reasonably handle.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from April 15, 2014
How might children in crisis be helped if everyone--teachers, social workers, troubled parents, and the courts--worked together for their best interests? This is the big question at the heart of this well-written first novel by McBride, an English teacher in Las Vegas. The author shows us a side of the town that tourists don't usually see, away from the glitz and glamour. Among the believable cast of characters is Avis, a middle-aged woman who has overcome a lot in her life and whose soldier son has returned from Iraq angry and abusive. The novel centers on Bashkim, the son of Muslim immigrants from Albania ill prepared for American life. (The only small flaw in the narrative is that the boy sometimes sounds too old for his eight years.) In a story line literally taken from newspaper headlines, the troubled immigrant family runs afoul of the police with tragic results. McBride is particularly good at probing the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder on soldiers in combat and on refugees uprooted from their homes. VERDICT McBride has written an urgent morality tale for our times in the form of this poignant and gripping debut.--Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2014
McBride's powerful debut is a tour de force of imagination that packs a wallop. She took a single real-life event and from it spun an immensely moving morality tale about how four vastly disparate people, each traveling his or her own road, all converge at an intersection of time and space to profound effect. Eight-year-old Albanian immigrant Bashkin Ahmeti writes a letter to an American GI in Iraq as part of a school pen-pal project. The reply he receives from Specialist Luis Rodriguez-Reyes, a native of Bashkin's new hometown of Las Vegas, spirals into a vortex that pulls in every bad act, personal and international, that McBride can think of into one cataclysmic event. Fans of tales about the butterfly effect will be drawn to this novel, though some may object to McBride's heavy hand at driving the point home too often and with over-the-top intensity. But, without question, McBride is a truly commanding literary presence, and her themes and characters, especially Bashkin, have good weight.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)