What the Family Needed
A Novel
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
In this incandescent novel, a family’s superpowers bestow not instant salvation but the miracle of accepting who they are.
“Okay, tell me which you want,” Alek asks his cousin at the outset of What the Family Needed. “To be able to fly or to be invisible.” And soon Giordana, a teenager suffering the bitter fallout of her parents’ divorce, finds that she can, at will, become as invisible as she feels. Later, Alek’s mother, newly adrift in the disturbing awareness that all is not well with her younger son, can suddenly swim with Olympic endurance. Over three decades, in fact, each member of this gorgeously imagined extended family discovers, at a moment of crisis, that he or she possesses a supernatural power.
But instead of crimes to fight and villains to vanquish, they confront inner demons, and their extraordinary abilities prove not to be magic weapons so much as expressions of their fears and longings as they struggle to come to terms with who they are and what fate deals them. As the years pass, their lives intersect and overlap in surprising and poignant ways, and they discover that the real magic lies not in their superpowers but in the very human and miraculous way they are able to accept, protect, and love one another.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Amsterdam's second novel (after Things We Didn't Know) tackles the family-in-crisis trope: divorce, financial struggles, a child adrift, and the loss of a spouse. Except each member of this family has a superpower. The book is written in vignettes that span 30 years and never land on the same person twice, and one of the delights is piecing together the truth about each character as his or her inner world and the family's perception intersect. Some of the characters' superpowers underscore the book's conventionality an insecure 15-year-old girl wills herself invisible while others feel somewhat arbitrary. Why exactly does Natalie have the power to swim fantastically? (The answer provided is flimsy at best.) Yet there are moments when the writing's simplicity becomes its own kind of superpower. In a section on grief, Peter loses his wife of 41 years (Natalie, the swimmer) and discovers he can make his desires real: funeral well-wishers appear and then vanish; Natalie's pumpkin mash steams on a plate and only after eating does Peter decide the flavor is too much to bear. It's a fresh take on grief, and when Peter realizes his loss, and that two lives lived in tandem are just that, the book soars. A late revelation, however, threatens to reduce each vignette, and the novel, into a stylistic exercise.
