This is a book for all the people watchers of the universe. Who wonder who’s who and why and how they got to where they are. This book is for people who enjoy little tidbits on the way to a bigger pixture, and who as kids tried to find answers to questions plaguing a young mind. This book kept me guessing and reminiscing of movies like Harriet the Spy.

In a post-apocalyptic future, rising seas create crumbling landscapes and displace thousands of people. 11-year-old Silvia and her mother move to a formerly grand building called the Morningside. There, Silvia decides to investigate the mysterious penthouse resident who may – or may not – be a creature from legend. The Morningside is filled with folklore and beautifully lyrical thoughts on mothers, daughters, and the tales we choose to tell ourselves.

The setting: the future. Silvia [Sil] and her mother are refugees--relocated/"repopulated" to the Morningside, a decrepit high rise in Island City [likely NYC?] where her aunt, Ena, is the superintendent. Sil feels unmoored--no friends, no school, no life. Her mother is VERY secretive about their past. She loves Ena and her folktales. She becomes obsessed with Bezi Duras, a woman who lives in the penthouse in their building and leaves only at night via her own elevator to walk her three huge dogs--which she is convinced are really humans. Is she a Vila [a mythical creature]? And so it begins.

Totally out of my wheelhouse as I don't like dystopian novels [and am not sure why I requested save for the author!]. At the start, I was convinced this book was not for me. But, I became engaged and persevered, captured by the imagination and writing of this tome. The book is divided into four parts: Ena, Bezi Duras, Mila, and My Mother--but I thought it was really about Sil.

Eleven-year-old Sil is superstitious and out of sorts--forced by circumstances to carry a heavy load. She finally makes a friend, Mila--who pushes her edges. And makes another friend, the mysterious Lewis May/Lamb Osmond.

Some of the descriptions I liked:
"the Board's cadaverous president"
"He looked translucent, and was so thin he seemed to be held upright entirely by the structure of his suits."
"If she noticed the terror meltnig my smile, she didn't show it."
"a path-clearing tulle gown"
and many more.

I quite liked this book --not so much Book IV.

Still, recommend if you are so inclined to like this genre.

3+--rounding up.

The Morningside is without doubt a well written, carefully crafted story. I had difficulty reading it for a while, but Tea Obreht’s writing kept me going. I finally settled into the book and appreciated its construction, writing and creativity.

In a mostly-empty apartment building at the top of a submerged city, Silvia and her mother find a new home. The Repopulation Program papers finally got through, and now they’re with Aunt Ena, Silvia’s sister, who is superintendent of The Morningside. Silvia and her mother have been on the move for a long time; now it seems like they can finally settle down for a while with the last remaining relative. While they help Ena with the tasks of a super, Silvia learns more about her past from Ena than her mother has ever told her, although her mother is quick and harsh with her dismissal and disapproval of the stories: they sugarcoat the past. It doesn’t matter to Silvia. She hungers for any tidbit that can illuminate her and her mother’s past, gobbling up Ena’s stories about her violin-playing grandmother, the beauty of the Old Country, especially the folktale about the Vila and her sons. Ena tells them about The Morningside tenants, mainly to warn them away from the tenants who find fault with everything, and about the newshounds and amateur historians who try to break into the building to find out more about it. The one that stands out most to Silvia is Bezi Duras, the mysterious woman who lives alone in the penthouse suite. What does she do all day, and where does she go at night with her three monstrous dogs?

When Ena dies suddenly, Silvia, who is on a school waitlist, and her mother take over Ena’s super job. The mother occupies herself with tending to the building and occupants, but also takes up salvage diving to make extra money. This leaves Silvia alone at The Morningside more often than not, and she decides to figure out the puzzle of Bezi Duras. She doesn’t get very far before a new kid shows up at The Morningside with her parents. Her name is Mila, and she’s bossy where Silvia is meek, rich where Silvia is poor. All attempts to befriend Mila fail until Silvia reveals the reason for her spying mission. The ordinary takes on a magical allure when the secret is shared, and soon the girls find more than they expected.

What I love most about this novel is that O’Breht captures so clearly the dreamlike atmosphere of Island City, the surviving tip of a sunken metropolis whose hidden places can still be entered from weedy, derelict highways and subway tunnels that are only exposed when the tide goes out or by gaining access to forbidden places like Bezi Duras’ apartment or the underwater treasures in the dining room of a drowned mansion. The Morningside is a novel of otherness, of other lands, of other realities and possibilities. As a result, the reader is given a story that is part speculative fiction, part fairy tale, and you can’t see the seams between the two.

Thank you, Penguin Random House and NetGalley, for giving me access to the ARC for review. Any opinions are my own; I’m not receiving any kind of douceur for my write-up.

A multi layered story in a dystopian world. There is much going on here and it kept me engaged. I loved the well developed characters.
Many thanks to Random House and to Netgalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

Sometimes you get a book that you just don’t know how to talk about or maybe where to start. I’ve been thinking about this one for a minute.

Silvia and her mother are forced to immigrate from their home and are accepted into The Morningside as part of a program to bring people back to a city that is slowly sinking into the water in hopes that it will get better. They live with Ena, Silvia’s aunt who passes down folktales to Silvia from her home country. These stories and her aunts passing spin Silvia into a fantasy where she is trying to unravel the mystery around Bezi Duras, a woman with three large dogs she only walks at night.

What worked most for me in this novel was the writing. This is my first time reading Téa Obreht. Her writing is gorgeous and the setting of the city(Manhattan-esque) which we can assume has been affected by climate change or a climate disaster is eerie. I loved that it has a dystopian , post-apocalyptic vibe with out needing to shout it.

The child’s fantasy/magical realism is intriguing. Silvia very much is an unreliable narrator. She is a child. Pretty much left to her own devices and filled with folktales told by her aunt in a way that blends fact and fiction. I’m less prone to call or magical realism and more magical thinking. This in someways backfired for me as a reader who had a harder time suspending s disbelief and instead looked to piece out what was actually taking place in the novel. This of course may have been the point but ended up frustrating and distracting me at times especially in the beginning when I was still buying into the premise.

I loved the side story about Mays and honestly almost wished that was the novel. I also think the exploration of how we hold onto and let go of culture as migrants to find belonging was truly compelling.

At times this novel is too quiet and at times melodramatic. I think some of the meaning gets lost because of Sylvia’s magical thinking. Also so much of this novel explores mother daughter relationship and how it juxtaposes with female adolescent friendships which I loved but also would have loved to see more of Sylvia’s mother. I never felt like I knew her in the way I knew Mays or Ena. Though does a preteen daughter ever know her mother? Maybe it was a stylistic choice by Obreht.

Overall it was a rough start though I engaged more in the last half. Obreht endeavors to explore som interesting and compelling themes even if for me it wasn’t as successful as I had hoped.

Also major props for this stunning cover. I was so drawn to this based on cover alone.

Thank you @netgalley and @randomhouse for my advanced copy! ***out March 19th!***

If you were tasked with the creation of a story that combines the genres of dystopia, magical realism, and even some mystery, how would you go about it?

Téa Obreht manages this feat wonderfully in "The Morningside" by taking the reader into a world changed forever due to climate change. Sil, the 11-year-old protagonist, tries to make sense of her new home that's a remnant of a flooded metropolis from the world before. She and her mother moved away from their country of origin to join Sil’s aunt Eda in Island City, a place that brings to mind a dystopian Manhattan.

Eda seems to find her internal answers to the ever-changing new world in folklore that very much hints at a Balkan or Eastern European family heritage. The mythical stories Eda tells her niece serve to fill the void that young Sil experiences in her lonely new environment where a reliable schooling system has not been established.

Sil sets out to solve one of the folklore mysteries Eda hints at just before she dies. A woman that lives in her building has two dogs that apparently shapeshift into humans by day.

Sil's efforts are not welcomed by her mother, who unlike Eda tries very hard to leave the past and the old country behind. And so it is that a coming of age conflict between mother and daughter unfolds that eventually comes to a head when it becomes clear that the past will always be part of the present, but not always in the ways we might like.

I enjoyed reading this story for its wonderful writing above anything. The author beautifully visualizes the world she builds. Island City and its dilapidated buildings appear so special despite the dystopian reality.

"To the South, the buildings, stacked shoulder to shoulder like coffins, the pale roofs with their vandalized water towers. [...] To the West, the endless park, black with trees, and beyond it the hazy smear of the bay."

"You couldn't tell if a wire had come loose or if the building just needed a minute to pull itself together. In such instances it was advisable to wait before touching anything, to listen for the exhalation of those dense, rust-streaked basement walls."

I was struggling a bit with the mystery - I wasn’t entirely sure if my interpretation of the ending was “correct”. It appeared to me that Sil's discovery on the book's last page, decades after her search for the truth behind the two dogs, tied in with the folklore about a daughter’s imprisonment, brought on by the Vila’s wrath. I am fairly certain that that's what the author was trying to do, but questions remain, and some loose ends could presumably be tied up a little more in detail.

Ultimately, this is a beautiful character-driven work of literary fiction. A mother-daughter story. A story of resilience, of overcoming. A story on the failures of humanity, expressed via the case of climate change, and how we try to forge on despite knowing deep inside that we've already dug our own demise by ignoring the signs for too long.

"Why does every step we take forward have to be followed up with some predictably human setback. It's like we don't know the fight is already over or something."

Thank you Téa Obreht for putting your soul into this beautiful work of art. It really shows. 🤍

Thank you Netgalley and Random House for the Advance Reader's Copy. The opportunity to review literature means the world to me. This book is set to come out on March 19, 2024.

"The Morningside" by Téa Obreht is a Family and Literary Fiction Story Sprinkled With Magical Realism and Set in a Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic World!

Holy-Moly! There's a lot going on in this story...

Silvia knows little about where she's from, why they had to leave, or why her mother keeps their past so secretive. The only thing she knows is now they're living at The Morningside, an aging luxury high-rise in Island City where her Aunt Ena has lived and worked for the past ten years.

Silvia loves her conversations with Aunt Ena, who feeds her imagination with stories about the homeland she doesn't remember. Silvia becomes enamored by Ena's tales and her imagination spills over with thoughts about the mysterious resident living in the penthouse. She makes it her focus to discover the truth about this woman's life...

"The Morningside" is a Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic story written in the first-person narrative of curious eleven-year-old Silvia. Silvia is quiet, bright, and observant and possesses keen senses for a child her age. Perhaps it's due to being raised by a mother who shares little that Silvia is driven to find answers on her own.

Silvia meets two individuals she develops friendships with and it's through these connections the story becomes more about the characters and relationships and less about the changing world described in Obreht's lovely writing.

The story can feel cramped with melodrama and distractions, jumping from one catastrophe to the next, and taking abrupt turns through unexpected decisions by the characters. For me, it added additional layers and interest.

"The Morningside" is creative and original storytelling about a mother-daughter relationship, finding family, and discovering your place in the world. I recommend it to readers who enjoy a well-written character-driven Family and Literary Fiction story with touches of Magical Realism like I do. I plan to look at Téa Obreht's backlist for more to read while I wait for her next book!

4⭐

Thank you to Random House and Téa Obreht for a physical ARC, and a DRC of this book through NetGalley. It has been an honor to give my honest and voluntary review.

This is a difficult book for me to rate. Tea Obreht is a skillful writer, but this was a slog of a book.
The Morningside tells the story of Silvia, a young girl forced to leave her homeland. She lives in The Morningside apartments, relocated there by the government. She becomes focused on her neighbor Bezi Duras and her dogs she walks at night and develops a friendship with an author who is connected to the city in deeper ways.
Obrecht seems to just skim the surface with her descriptions, which makes the book slow and leaves me wanting more. I wanted to understand why people had to flee their homelands. I wanted to understand who the government was and why they were relocating people. I wanted to understand more about the universe she was creating and I was left unsatisfied.
What Obrecht does expertly is write about motherhood. She notes she wrote the book while pregnant and as a new mother. It is incredible in just a few short years, she was able to tap into the deep feelings (love, frustration, sacrifice) that mothers feel for their children, particularly for their daughters). And that is where the book shines.

thanks to #TheMorningside #NetGalley for the eARC

What an unusual, strange and beautifully written book about a mother and daughter and the stories we tell and those we don’t. I would recommend this to book clubs. Thank you Random House and NetGalley for the egalley.

The Morningside by Téa Obreht is set in the not-so-distant future, where due to the destructive forces of human nature, the world has been ravaged by rising tides, food shortages, and unpredictable weather patterns.

Silvia and her mother have come to reside at The Morningside, what was once a luxury tower. As part of the Repopulation Program, they have been allowed to immigrate to this community. As part of the Posterity Initiative, everyone has limited access to rations, and eating meat is forbidden.

This is a novel about secrets, mourning what was, and how the world and humanity can recover what it lost. However, I felt it was trying to do and be too many things all at once. First, there's the post-apocalyptic aspect, and then on top of that, we have folklore, magical realism, and classism.

Overall, I just didn't get into the story or the characters. I would have enjoyed it more without the magical realism aspect, which I felt detracted from the other parts of the plot.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for an advance copy in exchange for sharing my opinions. All opinions in this review are my own.

This book feels just like Téa Obreht's other books while remaining distinctively original. It has many of her signature elements: vivid settings where buildings and places have their own unique personalities, characters with rich histories, a discussion of one's roots, and a magical quality interwoven with reality to the point where the truth cannot be precisely determined. I have always loved the open-ended, multiple possibilities that her endings have teased, and this one does not disappoint. The writing style is gorgeous and leaves tantalizing hints that contribute to the overarching feeling that more is going on beneath the surface, although what it is exactly is difficult to determine. Meeting all of the characters and learning their stories was delightful. The pacing was done well, with new developments both answering and generating more questions right up to the ending. I enjoyed the organization of the book and the differences between each character and how they view the world. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to read about climate change and a refugee crisis in a dystopian setting with a generous featuring of folklore, ancestral magic, and a discussion of knowing where one came from.

“It was a somber occasion: the first time we would be sleeping apart since before I could remember. Something about it felt even more terminal than Ena’s death. As if somebody were going into all the rooms of my life and turning out the lights one by one.”

This was such a gorgeously written book. I received a copy through the Patreon program of @thoughtsfromapage podcast. Part of the traveling galley section of the lit lover membership.

This is a dystopian story exploring a mother daughter relationship and relocation. The year and place are indiscernible. I kept trying to backtrack to see if I missed information about either- but no- that is part of the story. This place that doesn’t exist in some future year after climate devastation including flooding. So I have to admit that this threw me off a little bit. It was harder to settle in because I couldn’t tell where I was. Of course that was the point- I was meant to focus on the people, not the time or place.

There was an edge to this story that I almost felt “not clever enough” to fully understand. Don’t get me wrong, the book is so engaging and interesting, but I feel like I left the story confused. Again- this was probably intentional, but I felt unsettled. Did I regret reading this? Definitely not. If you like speculative fiction- I think you’ll really enjoy this one.

There were so many astute observations and exquisite depictions of grief, of love, of curiosity and of displacement. And I loved the touch of magical realism. This one was a win for me. Thank you also to @randomhouse (one of my faves!) and @netgalley for the digital copy.

Tea Obreht is a beautiful writer and clearly has a gift with words. However, between the lyrical writing, the slower pace and the depressing nature of the subject matter I struggled to get through this one. I appreciate the advance copy!

If you enjoy sci fi and some fantasy then you will love this book. I'm not the biggest sci fi fan but I really really enjoyed this book. You keep reading because you just have to know how this book ends.

Obreht is a truly beautiful writer and every sentence of this book is a piece of art. But. I couldn't get myself to read to the end. It is very dark and very depressing. Just not something I want to read right now.

This is an airy, optimistic view of the post-apocalypse. Something slowly awful has happened to the world and the people in this book, largely confined to an island (to which all the bridges are underwater) are hopeful that their cumulative efforts to stem the tide of further destruction (not eating meat, etc) are working.

Obviously the strength of the book is Obreht, who is a glorious writer. This book is full of lush descriptions, fully rendered characters, and lovely turns of phase (e.g. "She tried to hide it, of course. To moat it with maybes.")

Ultimately this is a book about mothers and daughters and the lengths we'll go to keep them safe. At the beginning of the book, Sil's mother appears to be withholding and even cruel, but as the story continues more of her story is revealed and we see more of her inner turmoil, knowing that she's leaving her daughter a world more messed up than the one she herself was born into.

As she says to her daughter, "I realized that I'd brought you into life at a time when everyone else's debts has come due. Only, the debtors weren't around any more to pay up. So it'd be you doing the paying."

That a powerful sentiment shared by many parents who looks at the state of the planet and wonder what exact happened to the legacy we were supposed to have left our children.

The book has a shadow of the paranormal in it. At first I wasn't loving that element, but it felt more natural as the book went on. If you don't believe in that stuff, it shouldn't bother you too much.

I think this book may be polarizing to some as it is soft, dreamy, and takes its time. In other works, it lacks some narrative bite. Ultimately the quality of the writing made that OK for me, but others may not enjoy that tone.

Thank you to the author and NetGalley for granting me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed this book, it was very well written and I found the story well paced. Sylvia and her Mother are recently arrived in a new city, their numerous city in the past several years, so many that Sylvia can't remember them all. This City is an island, climate change has flooded large parts of the world and a repopulation program moves people into areas where residents are needed. They live in The Morningside, a 30 some story residential high rise where Ena (Sylvia's aunt) is a caretaker/superintendent, until one day she suddenly passes away and Sylvia and her mom take over the duties. There are no children Sylvia's age in the building, she's twelve, until one day Mila and her family move in and Sylvia goes out of her way to try and befriend her, they do become friends of a sort. Sylvia's mom takes advantage of an opportunity to become a salvage diver, a dangerous but well paid job. A mysterious woman lives in the penthouse, Bezi, who lives with three large dogs and rarely talks to anyone else. Mila and Sylvia explore the City, going to places where they shouldn't, following Bezi who walks her dogs nightly. The story unfolds in 4 parts, one person is the focus of that part, and at the end the story ties together very nicely. I would highly recommend, particularly if you like mother/daughter type stories. Thanks to #Netgalley and #Random House for the ARC.

Post-apocalypse,
how to keep your daughter safe?
Which tales should she know?
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I write haiku reviews but am happy to provide more feedback.