Brass : a novel /

picture A place called Waterbury, Conn., and you might, as I did, imagine rows of Victorian houses with wide porches, driveways lined with expensive cars, beloved daughters with bright and easy futures. But Xhenet Aliu's perceptive debut novel, "Brass," offers a reminder that assumptions - whether about a place, or a person as close to you as your mother - never tell the full story. In Aliu's Waterbury, daughters aren't exactly wanted. Instead of Victorians, there are triple-deckers, their porches lined with railings that flex against a body's weight. Meals are sometimes labeled "GRADE D BUT EDIBLE." The brass factories that had once made the town attractive to waves of Eastern European immigrants have long been closed, though the grandchildren of those hopeful workers remain, largely trapped in dead-end jobs. Aliu's characters, most of whom have seen little of the world outside of Waterbury, understand at a visceral level that to live costs money; everything in this novel - the rubber soles on sneakers, bread from the Hostess outlet, an ultrasound - is quantified. One narrative thread is uneasily resolved when a character upgrades from an air mattress to a bed. For Elsie and Lulu, the mother and daughter at the center of the book, the most valuable thing in Waterbury is a ticket out. "Brass" is their duet, and Elsie sings the opening note. She is the young granddaughter of Lithuanian immigrants, a waitress, with a doomed crush on Bashkim, an Albanian line cook with secrets back home. In an abrupt second chapter shift, their 17-year-old daughter Luljeta takes over, narrating in a second person that feels appropriate for a girl in the middle of crisis. Lulu, a soft-spoken, Honor Roll student, has just been rejected by N.Y.U. and suspended for fighting, all in the course of a single day. The plot advances through each woman's story; as the symmetries between them pile up, along with misunderstandings, the novel accumulates momentum and emotional power. In Elsie's storyline, we're reading for Lulu's arrival; meanwhile, in the narrative present, Lulu is rejecting her mother to pursue the mystery of the father who left her behind. After Lulu's suspension, Elsie, switching to the third person, accuses her daughter of not acting like herself: "Don't try to tell me. I'm her mother. You think I don't know Luljeta?" It's one of many funny exchanges in "Brass" - what daughter hasn't heard her mother say such a thing - but it's also a deft illustration of the way both women are hemmed in by the other's long-held assumptions. "And then it's infuriating, your mother's need for you," Lulu says, later. "It's not fair that you should serve as her primary motivation for getting out of bed in the morning, especially considering that you have no idea what the hell you want from your own life, other than to get out of this crap town and figure it out elsewhere." Reading that, I both wanted Lulu to "get out," and to shake her for being so ungrateful. They'll never see each other, or themselves, as clearly as the reader gets to see them both - that's the magic trick here. In granting the reader access to both women's interiority, Aliu brings to life the simple, heartbreaking fact that though our stories can intersect, we're ourselves alone. Except, maybe, when we are still part of our mothers. For fear of spoiling it, all I will say about the moment Elsie and Lulu meet for the first time is that it transformed what was already a unique coming-of-age story and an incisive reckoning with class in America to something unforgettably wise and powerful. From its opening page, "Brass" simmers with anger - the all too real byproduct of working hard for not enough, of being a woman in a place where women have little value, of getting knocked down one too many times. But when the simmer breaks into a boil, Aliu alchemizes that anger into love, and in doing so creates one of the most potent dramatizations of the bond between mother and daughter that I've ever read. Of course, the ending note is Lulu's - as the daughter, she will finish what her mother started. It's the kind of quiet closing gesture that feels less like an ending than an opening. I left this book with the sure sense that the characters were alive beyond its pages, though I wouldn't dare try to guess what they are up to - Elsie and Lulu are too real for that. JULIE buntin is the author of "Marlena."

*Starred Review* Rage and hilarity form a dynamic symbiosis in Aliu's debut novel, a stinging mother-and-daughter duet. Set in the defeated town of Waterbury, Connecticut, after its once-sustaining brass manufacturing industry went bust, it kicks off with Elsie giving up on high school and taking a job at a diner run by Albanian refugees. Elise has no memories of her father, who abandoned her, her brainy younger sister, and their sardonic, alcoholic mother Well-armored with low expectations and orneriness, Elsie falls into a rough affair of convenience (car sex in the diner parking lot) with Bashkim, a volatile cook battered by the horrors he escaped and worried about his wife, who refuses to leave Albania. Then Elsie gets pregnant. Her trenchant story alternates with that of her daughter, Luljeta, a high-school senior suddenly intent, 17 years later, on finding the father she knows nothing about. Also the author of a story collection, Domesticated Wild Things and Other Stories (2013), Aliu is spectacularly funny and deeply insightful. With all-the-way-live characters, vigorous observations, combative dialogue, bravado metaphors, and ninja parsing of social class, immigrant struggles, bad behavior, and stubborn hope, Aliu has created a boldly witty and astute inquiry into the nature-versus-nurture debate, the inheritance of pain, and the dream of transcendence.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist

Aliu juxtaposes a mother and daughter's late teenage desperation 17 years apart in her striking first novel. In the mid-'90s, Elsie waits tables at a greasy spoon in post-industrial Waterbury, Conn. She pins her hopes for upward mobility on Bashkim, an Albanian immigrant who left his wife in the old country and funnels all his money into mysterious investments. An unplanned pregnancy forces them into uneasy cohabitation, where Elsie copes with her mother's pessimism, the derision of the Albanian wives of Bashkim's friends, and her partner's alarming volatility. Aliu intersperses the story of their daughter, Luljeta, a senior in high school whose own hopes for escape from Waterbury are dashed with a rejection from NYU. As she reels, she also discovers her extended Albanian family still lives in the area and can answer questions about the father her mother claimed had died. With the help of Albanian teenager Ahmet, whose modest dreams of Panera franchises starkly contrast with Luljeta's glamorous goals of leaving town, she sets off to finally find her father. This is a captivating, moving story of drastic measures, failed schemes, and the loss of innocence. Agent: Julie Barer, The Book Group. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

DEBUT Home at last. That's what the people in Aliu's first novel are seeking: a feeling of belonging, a sense of possibilities. Originally from Lithuania, Elsie's family settles in a working-class town in Connecticut, where brass factories provide employment for the many immigrants who have come there. Elsie works at the local diner and finds what she is looking for in Bashkim, who also works there. Although he has a family back in Albania, he and Elsie get together in what becomes an unfortunate relationship. Seventeen years later, Lulu, Elsie's daughter, searches for new possibilities and is hampered by frustration. She knows nothing of her father, and asking her mother for answers goes nowhere. She decides to take on her own search for his identity, in the hopes that finding this piece of the puzzle will help everything in her life fall into place. VERDICT Deftly written in a style that is evocative of time and place, this universal story of the search for home is well translated into the blue-collar world of Elsie and Lulu. [See Prepub Alert, 7/31/17.]-Susanne Wells, Indianapolis P.L. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

This glimmering debut novel reflects on mother-daughter connections, abandonment and resilience, and dreams that endure despite the odds.Coming of age circa 1996 in Waterbury, Connecticut, a chilly, gritty industrial city of abandoned brass factories and the workers left behind, Elsie dreams of a fast car out of town. Instead, and perhaps inevitably, she finds herself stuck, succumbing to the attentions of Bashkim, an Albanian line cook at the Betsy Ross Diner, where she slings fried foods for locals as a waitress. Bashkim, who has a wife back in Albania he says he plans to divorce, tells 18-year-old Elsie she's the most beautiful girl he's ever seen, teaches her to drive a stick shift, and promises to buy her whatever she wants when his investments pay off. Then he gets Elsie pregnant and sticks around long enough to compel her to keep the babya daughter, it turns outbut not long enough to help raise her. First-time novelist Aliu switches quickly between Elsie's story and that of her daughter, Luljeta, whom we meet when she is 17 and confronting her own urge to escape her fate as a fatherless child in a dead-end town of dusty dreams. Lulu, a bright young woman who has always worked hard and followed the rules, finds herself suddenly doubtful of her own future and scornful of the mother who, while dedicated to providing for her, has not provided answers about her past. And so Lulu goes looking for them in places both unfamiliar and, ultimately, long known. Aliu's riveting, sensitive work shines with warmth, clarity, and a generosity of spirit. Her characters are nuanced and real, capable of taking risks, making mistakes, and growing in unexpected ways.Aliu's writing is polished and precise, bringing her characters glowingly to life. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.