A Country You Can Leave

September 1, 2022

Living at the seen-better-days Oasis Mobile Estates, Black biracial Lara struggles to chart an escape route from her controlling white, Russian-born mother, who's tenacious of spirit but unwilling to share anything of her past. Then an act of violence brings out the burdens of inherited trauma. From the author of two nonfiction titles, Strange Trade and Intimate.

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Starred review from November 28, 2022
In Angel-Ajani’s piercing debut novel (after the nonfiction narrative Strange Trade), a mother and daughter are emotionally paralyzed by the fear of failing each other. After a childhood spent on the move, 16-year-old Lara is no stranger to starting over. So when she and her single mother, Yevgenia, a Russian immigrant, land in a dilapidated mobile home park in the California desert, Lara thinks she knows what to expect. Yevgenia, a bartender, leads a promiscuous sex life and pays more attention to her customers and Lara’s friends than to Lara. Yevgenia’s also full of opinions on Russian literature, love, and sex—all things Lara knows nothing about, despite continually reading the notebooks full of prescriptive pronouncements Yevgenia has compiled for her. Lara is convinced Yevgenia is ashamed of her for being biracial (her father, who disappeared from their lives, was a Black musician) and fears that following her mother’s advice will mean following in Yevgenia’s meandering footsteps. Meanwhile, a Black classmate jokingly discourages Lara from trying to find her father (“That you don’t have a father is the Blackest thing about you.... And your obsession and longing for him is the whitest”). But after a man attacks Lara, she realizes Yevgenia’s motivations are far more complicated—and that Lara herself might need to make difficult choices to set them both free. In perceptive prose and wry dialogue, Angel-Ajani brings to life a mother and daughter trapped by their circumstances. This is exemplary. Agent: Julia Eagleton, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

January 15, 2023
A Black, biracial teen and her Russian mother navigate their tumultuous relationship in a California desert trailer park. She's Black and her mother is Russian, and the gulf between them is as wide, hot, and seemingly impenetrable as the Mojave Desert, but 16-year-old Lara Montoya-Borislava knows what people expect of her: "Girls like me end up being girls like my mother." Lara is not much like Yevgenia, she doesn't think, but the circumstances of their lives keep throwing them up against each other, testing that theory and fraying the rough edges of their relationship. A peripatetic life of poverty as Yevgenia moves from one man to the next has landed them in the blast furnace of the Oasis Mobile Estates, a trailer park in the California desert, where Lara begins to confront the question of whether she will follow her mother's scorched-earth path. The focus of this sharp, observant debut novel, which deftly blends humor and hard truths while examining economic inequities and the emotional toll they take, is the fraught mother-daughter connection, the push and pull between Yevgenia, who spouts grand ideas about love, men, and casual sex, and Lara, who is taking her first real steps toward adulthood. The women clash on many fronts, Yevgenia arguing that class divisions loom larger in America than racial divides, while Lara bears the brunt of casual racism. When Lara finds herself attracted to a handsome older neighbor, their battles escalate. On occasion Yevgenia seems too colorful to be true--writing down life lessons in a book for the daughter she periodically abandons seems out of character for her, as do her frequent taunts about her daughter's sexual inexperience--and a side plot about Lara's quickly abandoned search for her Cuban father feels superfluous. But Angel-Ajani makes you care about Lara's tentative steps to a hard-won freedom. Sharp observations and insights about a stormy mother-daughter bond and a bracing examination of poverty in America.

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January 1, 2023
Lara is nothing like her heavily sequined, chain-smoking mother, Yevgenia, who left Russia in the early eighties and has been nomadic ever since. Brash, always reading, and always complaining about the lack of intellectualism in the U.S., Yevgenia works as a waitress at a rural desert dive bar outside Los Angeles. Lara is Black--half Slavic, half Afro-Cuban--and, thanks to her latent Soviet mentality, Yevgenia sees social class as more pertinent than race, leaving Lara alone to navigate so much. This impressive debut novel follows Lara through her late teenage years as she struggles to make sense of herself, her mother, and her place in the world. Lara is an enchanting protagonist, equal parts skeptic and romantic. She dreams beyond the Oasis, the plot of mobile homes where she and Yevgenia currently reside. Lara's quest morphs into a journey to find friendship, then her father, and then what, exactly, her future might hold. Angel-Ajani's book is breathless and beautiful, and Lara is a gloriously brave American hero.

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