A COUNTRY YOU CAN LEAVE

A Black, biracial teen and her Russian mother navigate their tumultuous relationship in a California desert trailer park.

She’s Black and her mother is Russian, and the gulf between them is as wide, hot, and seemingly impenetrable as the Mojave Desert, but 16-year-old Lara Montoya-Borislava knows what people expect of her: “Girls like me end up being girls like my mother.” Lara is not much like Yevgenia, she doesn’t think, but the circumstances of their lives keep throwing them up against each other, testing that theory and fraying the rough edges of their relationship. A peripatetic life of poverty as Yevgenia moves from one man to the next has landed them in the blast furnace of the Oasis Mobile Estates, a trailer park in the California desert, where Lara begins to confront the question of whether she will follow her mother’s scorched-earth path. The focus of this sharp, observant debut novel, which deftly blends humor and hard truths while examining economic inequities and the emotional toll they take, is the fraught mother-daughter connection, the push and pull between Yevgenia, who spouts grand ideas about love, men, and casual sex, and Lara, who is taking her first real steps toward adulthood. The women clash on many fronts, Yevgenia arguing that class divisions loom larger in America than racial divides, while Lara bears the brunt of casual racism. When Lara finds herself attracted to a handsome older neighbor, their battles escalate. On occasion Yevgenia seems too colorful to be true—writing down life lessons in a book for the daughter she periodically abandons seems out of character for her, as do her frequent taunts about her daughter’s sexual inexperience—and a side plot about Lara’s quickly abandoned search for her Cuban father feels superfluous. But Angel-Ajani makes you care about Lara’s tentative steps to a hard-won freedom.

Sharp observations and insights about a stormy mother-daughter bond and a bracing examination of poverty in America.