I'LL BE RIGHT HERE

An unconventional chosen family spreads its branches over decades and continents.

Bloom’s latest opens with a deathbed scene that introduces the core cast of her lively but elliptical narrative, which hopscotches from France in the 1930s and ‘40s to Mexico in the 1980s to the Hudson Valley in the 1990s and 2010s, adding numerous key characters along the way. (Get out your pencil and paper, because you’re not going to be able to remember who’s who without taking notes.) At the center of the ensemble are Gazala and Samir Benamar, a French Algerian sister and brother who are orphaned in prewar Paris. Typical of this novel, their baker father is killed off in a single, glancing sentence: “We do not arrange for a proper burial.” Similarly, we are told only in passing that Samir was adopted as a baby by Gazala’s parents, a fact worth recalling when the two, after many years of separation, reunite and become lovers. A wonderful section has Gazala working for the writer Colette during the Vichy occupation and meeting her friend the jewelry designer Suzanne Belperron (do Google to get a peek at her work). After the war, Gazala emigrates to New York and becomes a baker herself. There she meets the Cohen family, whose daughters, Alma and Anne, become part of the core group known as the Greats, pillars of the chosen family, the ones who eventually gather at Gazala’s deathbed. Anne Cohen will eventually leave her husband, Richard, for his sister, Honey, a novelist. Early in the novel, a shaggy-dog storytelling game called Barbary Lion Escapes is introduced; later we learn of another one called Dead People’s Party, “a mental get-together of everyone you’ve ever known who mattered.” Well, this novel is Barbary Lion meets Dead People’s Party—full of surprises, wild leaps and turns, and many fascinating people who love each other.

Warm, rich, beautifully written, and very hard to follow.