The New York Times Book Review - Megan Hustad
Sonnenberg writes about expatriate life with an easy authority.
Publishers Weekly
03/17/2014
Drawing on her upbringing as a “third culture kid” (a child who grows up in a culture other than that of his or her parents), Sonnenberg delivers a sympathetic, funny debut. Elise wants to escape from her hometown in Mississippi, so when she marries Chris Kriegstein, CEO of a company whose job takes him around the world, she’s on board for globe-trotting adventure. Although Elise is at first ambivalent about motherhood, she and Chris eventually have two beloved daughters, Leah and Sophie, who grow up as much in Shanghai and Singapore as they do in the U.S. They return to the States once a year (“to remind you of what you were missing and where you were really from”), but the trip often leaves the family feeling fragmented. Then tragedy strikes, and the Kriegsteins must consider what home and family mean when there’s no real home to return to. The story spans 1885 to the present, and some of the chapters, written from multiple points of view (including that of Elise’s childhood home, Chris’s German great-grandmother, and a “we” meant to encompass the voices of all third-culture young adults), read like writing class exercises. But these continuously shifting perspectives also help convey the disorientation of the Kriegsteins’ lives, and Sonnenberg eloquently illustrates the challenges and rewards of expat life. (June)
From the Publisher
"A lyrical meditation on loss, geographical place, expatriate experience, sibling rivalry, family, and growing up. Sonnenberg writes with clarity about the messiness of the expat Kriegstein family's lives. . . . Sonnenberg captures beautifully what it's like to grow up as an American abroad, not as a tourist but not fully as a native either."—Cleaver Magazine
"[An] inventive debut . . . Captures the everywhere-but-nowhere paradoxes of our global world."—Vogue.com (A "Summer Book" selection)
"[A] striking debut."—Bethanne Patrick, Washingtonian ("A Top 10 Book for June")
"Emotionally charged . . . The Kreigsteins are such authentic and complex characters that readers will be captivated by all of them."—Real Simple ("The Best Books of 2014")
"Stark but sweet, warm and wise, Home Leave is an ambitious, well-executed debut. . . [it] will leave many readers hoping for another Sonnenberg novel full of the same humor, compassion and honesty."—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"HOME LEAVE announces the debut of a writer to be reckoned with. . . . A moving multiple-narrative exploration of the life of a peripatetic family torn asunder by the death in the family. . . . Sonnenberg explores each character's inner and outer world with psychological acuity. . . . Sonnenberg [is] a writer of boundless creativity, polished prose, and impressive insight produced by her own world travels and wide range of experiences."—ReadHerLikeanOpenBook.com
"The lucidity of Sonnenberg's prose . . . is notable for its stark honesty and sharply observed details. . . . [An] ambitious debut."—Kirkus Reviews
"Sonnenberg delivers a sympathetic, funny debut."—Publishers Weekly
"Sonnenberg writes like a house on fire. The opening chapter alone is worth the price of this book."—ReadHerLikeanOpenBook.wordpress.com
"HOME LEAVE is a rich, lively novel. Original in conception and set in various continents, it describes migrations as a contemporary existential condition. More importantly, it shows how this condition effects change, loss, and growth in the migrants. It offers many insights that are true."—Ha Jin, National Book Award winner for Waiting
"It's hard to believe that this astonishing novel is Brittani Sonnenberg's first—she writes about family with wisdom, humor, and native daring. Here is Persephone's journey, undertaken by an entire family, the Kriegsteins, who ricochet through time zones, moving from Berlin to Singapore to Wisconsin to Shanghai to Atlanta, together and alone. Sonnenberg's prose is so vital and so enchanting that you will read this book in the dilated state of a world-traveler, with all of your senses wide open. Her family members are so well-drawn and complex that you'll close this book certain they exist."—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove
"A captivating tour de force that follows a nomadic family across generations and continents."—filmmaker Wim Wenders
"Brittani Sonnenberg, like the best storytellers, shows us what we carry and what we leave behind as we travel across time zones (from America to Germany to Singapore), as we sit in airports, alone with the aloneness, as we love, live, grieve, and then try to live once more. Authentic, beautiful, bravely-told, HOME LEAVE is alive with characters you want to protect and hold-characters you won't want to leave behind."—Nami Mun, author of Miles from Nowhere
"HOME LEAVEis a remarkable debut, notable for the insightful intimacy of its characterization and a restless formal invention which perfectly evokes the uncertainties of expatriate life."—Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl
Peter Ho Davies
"HOME LEAVE is a remarkable debut, notable for the insightful intimacy of its characterization and a restless formal invention which perfectly evokes the uncertainties of expatriate life."
Nami Mun
"Brittani Sonnenberg, like the best storytellers, shows us what we carry and what we leave behind as we travel across time zones (from America to Germany to Singapore), as we sit in airports, alone with the aloneness, as we love, live, grieve, and then try to live once more. Authentic, beautiful, bravely-told, HOME LEAVE is alive with characters you want to protect and hold-characters you won't want to leave behind."
filmmaker Wim Wenders
"A captivating tour de force that follows a nomadic family across generations and continents."
Karen Russell
"It's hard to believe that this astonishing novel is Brittani Sonnenberg's first--she writes about family with wisdom, humor, and native daring. Here is Persephone's journey, undertaken by an entire family, the Kriegsteins, who ricochet through time zones, moving from Berlin to Singapore to Wisconsin to Shanghai to Atlanta, together and alone. Sonnenberg's prose is so vital and so enchanting that you will read this book in the dilated state of a world-traveler, with all of your senses wide open. Her family members are so well-drawn and complex that you'll close this book certain they exist."
Ha Jin
"HOME LEAVE is a rich, lively novel. Original in conception and set in various continents, it describes migrations as a contemporary existential condition. More importantly, it shows how this condition effects change, loss, and growth in the migrants. It offers many insights that are true."
Kirkus Reviews
2014-04-16
A tapestry of settings and voices speaks of dislocation and grief in Sonnenberg's ambitious debut.Multiple narrators—both human and inanimate—relate the story of the Kriegstein family: father Chris, who escaped Midwestern dreariness for corporate stardom; mother Elise, whose genteel Southern childhood ended abruptly with her grandfather's abuse; and their daughters, Leah and Sophie. Elise's childhood home bemoans the desolation of losing its last resident, Elise's elderly mother, Ada, to a nursing home—and the rift that arose when Ada accused Elise of "telling tales" about her grandfather. Chris' parents, reluctant assisted living residents, comment on their son's distance—emotional and geographical. From there, the narrators and points of view proliferate, ranging from deeply interior to collective and omniscient. During the first of Chris' many international postings, to Hamburg, Germany, Elise, pregnant with Leah, blunders into a bizarre winter picnic with strangers, perhaps intended to symbolize her own frozen family life, past and future. Back in the States, left alone as Chris travels, Elise is unable to muster motherly feelings for baby Leah. As teens, negotiating a difficult adjustment to life in Shanghai, Leah and Sophie are most comfortable when they can escape the expat country club and American School for summer "home leaves" with their grandparents. Early on, visits to a family therapist, presented as scenes from a play, reveal that Sophie has died suddenly—though she is still very much present, especially to Leah. Sonnenberg is particularly adept at portraying the conflicting and ambivalent feelings associated with grief: anguish, guilt, even relief (on Leah's part) that she no longer has to compete with her blonde, athletic younger sibling for her parents' or boys' attention. Since the nuclear Kriegstein family is the main focus, chapters featuring peripheral characters, though intriguing in themselves, serve only to distract. The experimental form cannot, however, distract from the lucidity of Sonnenberg's prose, which is notable for its stark honesty and sharply observed details.
