When We Get There: A Novel - Hardcover

Seliy, Shauna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1596913509 ISBN 13: 9781596913509

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2007

Synopsis

Over the course of one winter in 1974, in the coal-mining town of Banning, Pennsylvania, the youngest member of a large and boisterous Eastern European family gives himself a tall order: to find his mother, who recently disappeared without explanation. Lucas, an only child whose father died several years earlier in a coa-mine blast, lives with the legacy of loss. Despite his heavy inheritance, Lucas is still just a thirteen-year-old boy puzzling out the world around him. He shuttles between the homes of his family elders whose old-world ways he can't quite understand. When Zoli, his mother's embittered admirer, takes it upon himself to find his lost love, violence and retribution escalate until no one, especially Lucas, is safe. As he struggles to find his place in this unsettling landscape, Lucas's extended family and close-knit ethnic community circle around him. Set against the collapse of the industry that has sustained the family and the town for generations, When We Get There is a startling tale of one family's long winter―and the spring that eventually comes hard on winter's heels.

About this title

About the Author

Shauna Seliy work has appeared in the New Orleans Review, Meridian, and Other Voices. When We Get There is her first novel. She grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and lives in New York City.

Reviews

In her elegiac debut novel, Seliy explores one boy's coming-of-age over the course of a long, eventful, brutally cold winter. In 1974, 13-year-old Lucas Lessar's family lives in the shadow of one of western Pennsylvania's last remaining coal mines, King Mine in Banning. Lucas's father was killed there years ago; the mine is now about to be shuttered. As the book opens, Lucas's mother, Mirjana, who has been in "a long sleep" of grief and depression, has disappeared. Her suitor, Zoli, threatens Lucas to learn her whereabouts; anguished Lucas, who narrates, doesn't know and is protected by his close-knit extended family (of eastern European descent). Inspired mostly by his larger-than-life great-grandfather, Lucas sets out to find his mother and make her life better. He comes to recognize how loss—of his parents, but also of his immigrant family's work and ethnic identities—has shaped his life. Lucas is an authentic adolescent who, despite his anger (Zoli continues to rage, too) and taciturnity, develops empathy and transforms into a sympathetic young man. Suffused with close observations of family legends, superstitions and cultural traditions, Seliy's accomplished debut bids a bittersweet farewell to one way of life while anticipating promise down the road. (May)
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*Starred Review* Before dying in an underground explosion, Lucas' coal-miner father had a dream: he and his son, together, would find a special place in the Allegheny Forest called Heart's Content. But now Lucas, 13, has his own quest: to find his mother, who--deeply depressed by her husband's death--has gone away, leaving the boy with his grandmother, Slats, and the stern admonition not to search for her. Might as well tell the sun not to rise in the east! But Lucas isn't the only one looking for his mother: Zoli, a possibly deranged local man, is also on her trail. All of this drama is played out before the richly textured backdrop of Lucas' huge Russian, Croatian, and Hungarian family and the small western Pennsylvania mining community they inhabit. The word lovely might well have been coined for the express purpose of describing the sensibility that informs this splendid first novel. Seliy clearly knows her characters and their world intimately and manages to re-create them with dignity, humor, and a clear-eyed appreciation of their superstitions, failings, and small triumphs. Lucas may or may not find his heart's content, but readers surely will . . . in this exquisite work of fiction. Michael Cart
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1596913509
• ISBN 13: 9781596913509
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272