Review by Booklist Review
Marta and Nick are twins. Their lives have been inextricably linked since Nick came out of the womb grasping Marta's ankle. What they share, more than any physical trait, is their mutual love of the hairline dance between tragedy and magic. Both of them live life on the edge; they push every possible boundary, fueled by an invisible drive to break the family curse. Marta and Nick's ancestors have chronically fallen from great heights, ever since one particular elder pushed a lowly stonemason from a high balcony after he caught the stonemason gallivanting with his daughter. Marta and Nick feel these tragedies in their bones, as children obsessed with Buster Keaton, especially as they become adults and roommates in Prague. Not long after the twins return to the U.S., the curse hits close to home. Marta, Nick, and their mother must face their complex family history and complicated present dynamics head on. Written in sweeping prose rife with allegory (many unbelievable real-life falls told here), Branum's first novel is an honest, beautiful tale of fierce sibling love.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Branum's quirky and poignant debut focuses on a family beset by bad falls. Unreliable narrator Marta and her twin brother, Nick, both in their 20s, have grown up with an anxious Catholic Czech mother who believes the family is cursed because their great-grandfather pushed a man to his death from an under-construction church steeple. Marta and Nick cope with the ever-present superstition and their own fears by acting out scenes from Buster Keaton movies. After their father's death from heart failure, they spend several years living in Prague, and upon returning to their Midwestern city, Nick falls from a fifth-floor window, injuring himself severely, and Marta must reckon with her own problems, including her alcohol abuse. As Marta begins to forge a new relationship with her mother, and to untangle the codependent dynamic with her brother, she takes tentative steps toward building a life apart from the family curse. Moody and descriptive rather than plot-driven, Branum's narrative jumps blithely through time without missing a step. While readers may guess the secrets Marta is careful to conceal from herself, the collage of striking scenes and reflections offers frequent delights. Readers willing to go out on a limb will find much to savor. Agent: Frances Coady, Aragi Inc. (Jan.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A twin brother and sister work to overcome their family's superstition as well as their own personal demons. Marta and Nick were brought up by their mother with a warning about a tendency for people in their family to be gravely injured or killed by falls. It all began when a great-great-grandfather pushed a stonemason out a window in Prague, an act known as defenestration, which forced him to flee to the American Midwest and seems to have led to an uncanny string of falls in the family. Their father's love provided levity for the twins and balanced out their strictly religious mother's dogma, but after Nick graduates from college and tells his parents he's gay, his mother kicks him out, and the family is irrevocably changed. Told through brief vignettes from Marta's first-person perspective, the story recounts how the twins went to live in Prague and attempted to make sense of their upbringing and obsession with falling. In the current timeline, Marta visits Nick in the hospital after his own fall and remeets her mother after years of estrangement. Branum makes excellent use of the fragmented structure of her debut novel, offering meditations on Prague's rich history and architecture; Buster Keaton and his theatrical falls, as well as other historical people who famously survived falls; the difficulties of close relationships that define you but also bind you; and the complicated legacies of family stories that defy clarity or comfort. Even as Marta's own well-being depends on her finding an ability to heal separately from Nick, she muses on this unknowability: "I know then, with a shiver of certainty, that sometimes a story can have a meaning for the teller that no one else, no matter how many times they hear it, can unearth." A serious story, luminously told. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
