Review by Booklist Review
Annie and Edward are a normal couple with a normal baby and a normal coworker named Stephanie. But whenever Stephanie comes over to visit, something abnormal happens: the closet door in the back of their cramped city apartment turns into a portal to a gorgeous, refreshing terrace, outfitted with a patio set, twinkling lights, and an autumn breeze. One day, when Annie, Edward, the baby, and Stephanie are enjoying the patio, the whole dynamic violently shifts. The book then rewinds to explore Annie's and Stephanie's origin stories. Both lives are marked by grand heartbreak, storybook tragedy, and otherworldly phenomena. But even though the two women have experienced magic before, the terrace will still change everything for them and the people they hold close. Annie and Stephanie's conflict blows open each one's generational trauma, and highlights the notion that energy is cyclical. It cannot be created or destroyed, only changed. Based on Leichter's National Magazine Award--winning short story of the same name, Terrace Story is fun and profound, fickle and erudite. It is an irresistibly cool book.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The delightful sophomore effort from Leichter (Temporary) expands on her National Magazine Award--winning story about a magic closet by adding multiple timelines that stretch into the future. When Annie, Edward, and their baby daughter, Rose, are visited by their friend Stephanie in their cramped new apartment, having been forced to move by a rent hike, Stephanie reveals a sprawling terrace behind their closet door, which wasn't there before. Leichter then switches to the story of George and Lydia, another married couple with a small child, and describes the couple's unhappiness in novel terms ("They argued about why they were arguing, until every argument collapsed on itself and fit precariously in the bad kitchen cabinet where the miscellany of their marriage languished in obscurity"). In another timeline, Rose, who comes of age in a future on the brink of human extinction, lives on a space station described as a "suburb," and longs for a lover who's left on a mission to another suburb. Connecting these threads is Stephanie's act of manifesting Annie and Edward's terrace and the reverberations it causes, the details of which Leichter gradually teases out, setting the stage for a deeply satisfying ending. Along the way, there are plenty of wry observations on time and memory ("Then again--most beginnings, apocryphal. Almost always unobserved. Who can remember with any accuracy life's initial drift toward its final shape?"). Leichter soars with this cogent yet dreamlike tale. (Aug.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A group of characters linked across time and space navigate love and, often, its loss. In "Terrace Story," Leichter's 2020 National Magazine Award--winning short story, Edward and Annie, a young couple, move into a small city apartment with their infant daughter, Rose. One day, they invite Annie's co-worker Stephanie to dinner, and when Annie opens the door to what is normally a closet, she finds instead a beautiful terrace, bedecked with plants, furnished, filled with twinkling lights. This novel of the same name--though it is as much a collection of linked stories as a traditional novel--takes that piece as its symbolic core and imagines a constellation of characters for whom time and space are slippery at best. Part of the book's fun is figuring out the characters' connections to those from other sections, but in perhaps the novel's most compelling part, "Fortress," Leichter follows Stephanie, whose power to create and manipulate physical spaces (the reason Annie and Edward's terrace only appears when she's visiting their apartment) leads to a series of crushing heartbreaks. Leichter is not only interested in micro drama, though; this is also a big-picture look at the Late Anthropocene, with animals continually going extinct and many characters either historians or storytellers (one is a writer whose specialty is extinction). Leichter is juggling plenty of symbolism along with her zingy surrealism-lite and it can be a lot to untangle, but at the book's heart are the relatable grief and terror that go along with love--of our planet, of another--and the threat of losing it. As Leichter writes of one character, "All [she] wanted was a person on the other end of her stories." Leichter bends minds--and physics--to give a light touch to deep grief. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
