The book is a little bit uneven but I still felt it deeply. The ebbing and flowing tensions among the characters are believable and even relatable. The ending [spoiler alert] is hopeful but not cliché. Lena in particular feels real. One thing that bothered me is, for a book that takes place in the Bronx, there was not even a single mention of race or racial dynamics; I was left to assume the characters were white since the author is. A bit blind.

This book was almost more of a interconnected community of short stories than a novel, which took some getting used to but became the thing I loved most about it. Really beautifully written and conceived; shows so many layers of interconnectedness along racial, generational, and geographic lines. It wasn‘t a book to speed through but one to savor and I‘m sure it‘s one I‘ll come back to over the years.