I’ve read award-winning literary fiction that hasn’t evoked a family as well as this book does. It’s understated and poignant, lovely and funny. It’s also accidentally low key one of the best books I’ve read on war/PTSD. Each family member has their own voice and the way their POVs layer and overlap— an offhand comment from one casts the story of another in a new light— is impressive as hell. And all of that without being showy or overcomplicated.
Sometimes books feel like fate, dropping into your life at just the right moment, which is what this one does. And not just because it takes place in October through December. I keep a list of writers I’d publish if I owned a small press; Matt Dean is now on the list.
Soon, she thought— the sooner, the better— she would have to sit in privacy and silence and rewrite the history of her family. The stories she’d always told herself, the roles in which she’d cast her parents and her brothers— they’d been only about three-quarters correct.