PORCUPINES

A young single mother with a carefully guarded past reluctantly chaperones a school trip across California at the behest of her determined and curious daughter.

In 1989, 18-year-old Szonja Imre arrives in Los Angeles from Hungary to spend the summer with her married sister. In 2001, Sonia Imre dodges nosy PTA parents curious about a single mother with an unspecified background and a cagey demeanor. The how and why of this transformation is slowly revealed across both timelines, with excursions back and forth and in between, to Budapest, D.C., and California suburbia. When Szonja first arrives in Los Angeles, she’s surprised and a little disappointed by the rigidly structured life her once-close elder sister, Rina, has built. Now married to an Orthodox Jewish man, adult Rina has fully embraced the Jewish faith she and Szonja were raised to quietly ignore by their parents, both assiduously assimilated children of the Holocaust. As tension between the sisters grows, Szonja finds new connection with a boy from the Hebrew class she reluctantly attends each week. In the new millennium, Sonia’s daughter Mila has a plan: a parent-trap under the cover of a school orchestra trip to force her secretive mother to finally introduce her to the man who, she is certain, must be her father. But for Sonia, the trip is a series of minefields as she seeks to protect herself and her daughter from the fact of her less-than-legal status in America. Sonia/Szonja is a deliciously vivid character, her wry perspective revealing a character as spiky and vulnerable as the novel’s title suggests. Fabriczki’s prose dances lightly in a brisk, knowing, slightly aloof third-person present-tense voice perfectly tuned to its main character. Emotions slam in from the side, grief and alienation and the slow-dawning realization that “life unspools, one decision at a time cutting out entire alternative worlds, an endless series of bifurcations nudging each person into a life they have no way of knowing they will like or not.”

Taut, funny, and poignant; a tremendous debut.