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March 25, 2024
Burnham (It Is Wood, It Is Stone) offers an expressive if diffuse narrative of two first-generation Brazilian American sisters coping with the sudden deportation of their mother. Elise, about to graduate from college in North Carolina, hears from her 18-year-old sister, Sophie, that their mother, Gilda, has disappeared from their home on Nantucket. Elise then ditches her graduation ceremony to be with Sophie. A few days later, Gilda, who was working as a restaurant cook on the island, calls from her hometown in Brazil and explains that she was spied on, detained, and deported by ICE because of a missed court date many years ago, after her work visa expired. Elise returns to her high school job on Nantucket, monitoring endangered species, and Sophie works as a waitress. More trouble arrives after Gilda is served an eviction notice in absentia. Luckily, Sheba, Elise’s rich best friend at college, returns to her family’s summer house on the island and the sisters find refuge in her guesthouse. Burnham ably depicts the instability faced by taxpaying and hardworking immigrants such as Gilda, but loses her way in the gauzy summer chronicle of Elise, Sheba, and Sophie’s endless partying. This lacks the luster of Burnham’s potent debut. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

April 1, 2024
Two facts define Elise's life: she is the daughter of an undocumented Brazilian immigrant, and she is a Nantucket islander, born and raised in a place that most people, including her wealthy college friend, only think of as a vacation spot for the upper crust. When her mother gets deported on the eve of Elise's college graduation, Elise returns home for the first time in years to look after her younger sister. The two women navigate the sorrows and unexpected freedoms left by their mother's absence. Without her, they are isolated by their lack of money and by the island itself. Hemmed in as they are, they must rely on each other once more and reenact the closeness of their childhood. The sisters question if they can ever remake themselves in a place so familiar--or if they even want to. Their sense of possibility balances against Burnham's (It Is Wood, It Is Stone, 2020) second novel's disconcertingly accurate insights on class. Whimsical and poignant, this is a story readers will return to again and again.

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May 1, 2024
When their undocumented mother is deported, Elise, a recent college graduate, and her younger sister, Sophie, are forced to reboot their lives in this novel set on Nantucket. Although the central crisis of the novel is Gilda's deportation to her native Brazil after more than 20 years as a tax-paying resident of the United States, the unfairness of the U.S. immigration system is only one target here. Inequities of class and the often shallow hypocrisy of white liberals also come into play. Gilda supported her girls as a restaurant cook, and Elise grew up as a working-class local on wealthy Nantucket. Sheba, Elise's best friend from college, is an heiress who likes smoothing Elise's way financially, whether by lending her clothes or buying her airfare home from Chapel Hill after Gilda was deported the day before their graduation. When the sisters are evicted from the house their mother rented, Sheba invites them to stay in her family's luxurious summer estate. The friendship, which Elise analyzes in often fascinating detail, is supposedly deep and intimate, but class distinctions are never erasable. Sheba chafes when one of her two mothers parades Elise to her rich friends as her immigration project, but Sheba's own careless sense of entitlement is on frequent display, particularly when she invites locals to a party that gets seriously out of hand. Oddly, Gilda is a far less developed or interesting character. Applying for a green card to return to Nantucket, she's sporadically in touch with her kids but mostly concentrates on her new job in Brazil and on reconnecting with her long-lost father, so her immigration status becomes a less compelling issue for readers. Elise's conflicted relationships with mother, sister, friends, and potential lovers--Burnham also throws in some sexual moments as teasers that don't add up to much--are more absorbing. An engaging mixture of psychology and socioeconomics.

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