When We Get There

It is rare to pick up a first fiction that you can't put down. A luminous book. Shauna Seliy's writing is wonderfully spare, yet sharp and vivid, and her characters are utterly believable. A wonderful debut...I hope we'll see more from this author!

Not knowing what to expect from the title, I began reading When We Get There one night. I could barely put the book down. Ms. Seliy's style of writing seems to make the words fly off the page. The reader feels as if he or she is sitting in the room with the characters. Her use of local dialect is remarkable, and adds to the realistic portrayal of the backdrop of the characters' lives. I look forward to reading more of Ms. Seliy's work in the future!

Shauna Seliy captures the coming of age of Lucas Lessar in a small coal mining town where legend, superstition, faith, violence, real and imaginary fears, small delights, personal tragedies, loss and recovery challenge four generations of his family. This quiet, bright, observant, free-spirited, courageous narrator moves from one setting or generation to others, providing a complex narrative. The tough but always-faithful grandmother gives Lucas space to struggle with his own fears, losses, and discoveries while surrounding him with the love and tradition of family. The great grandfather's legendary strength is waning, but his wisdom and stories remain powerful. He is known for growing pears inside bottles to become wine for consolation and celebration. We see this mirrored as Lucas is nurtured, survives hardships, and matures to accept his fate. The rich cultural tapestry of the small town inhabited by immigrant families from Eastern Europe is clearly represented in characters, stories, music, and traditions. If you grew up on a small town or wish you had, this book will resonate with you.

I have just finished my second read of this book and loved it even more than the first time I read it. The author creates, with her fantastic use of language, such a deep sense of time and place that I walked away from this book feeling as though I knew Lucas' story (his town, his family, and his journey) as surely as I know my own. The author paints her characters and their humanness with such authentic artistry that you walk away knowing she must love them deeply to have drawn them with such magnificent detail. Her love extends, clearly, to the English language: some of the sentences in this book grabbed me with such descriptive strength that I found myself re-reading them in situ and pausing in appreciation of them. This is a novel about one boy's journey but will appeal to both men and women and even to more mature young readers.

This book is beautiful. It manages to be tender without being overly sentimental. The narrator, Lucas, who is looking back on the winter he was 13 years old, is wise and thoughtful and strangely funny. The world he describes - a coal mining town in western Pennsylvania with a rich immigrant heritage - is real and true. The story is full of "old world" superstitions, and potentially tragic situations. But the author also has a touch for the buoyant and joyful moments. At the heart of the book is the idea of searching. Great-grandfather's searching for a better life in America. Lucas's searching for his mother. All of that yearning moves the story along at a nice pace. And in the end, some unexpected things are found, not least of which is Lucas's sense of family, community, and himself. I especially loved the Croatian touches in the book, but it really could be about any ethnic community and how it transforms and what it holds on to in the second and third generations of immigrants in America. There is something very universal about this story. I highly recommend it - and it is appropriate for many audiences.