Daughters of the Air
by Anca L. Szilágyi
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Dec 05 2017 | Archive Date Jan 15 2018
Description
When Pluta’s father, a university professor, disappears amid the turmoil of Argentina’s Dirty War, her family’s idyllic life crumbles. Unsure where he’s been taken or whether he’s even alive, Pluta and her mother struggle to cope with the disappearance—and to voice their fears and pain to one another.
Exiled to a boarding school in New York and churning with unresolved grief, Pluta runs away to Brooklyn in 1980. Her harrowing and surreal experiences on the dangerous streets soon threaten to destroy her completely—but may also at last break through the suffocating silence that has held her family captive.
Advance Praise
“A riveting and magical lament: for childhood, for the lost, and for the disappeared. Szilágyi has written a heartbreaking pageturner, rich in history and humanity.”
—Sean Michaels, author of Us Conductors, winner of the Giller Prize
“Dirty—the war in Argentina. Dirty—the father’s disappearance. Dirty—the mother’s emotional withdrawal from her daughter. Dirty—the creaky Coney Island Wonder Wheel, the gritty New York City streets, and the polluted Gowanus Canal. Pluta, the teenage heroine of Daughters of the Air, flees from one dark place to others darker still, from one unfulfilled promise of escape to another. Yet in art, in opera, in the lusciousness of Anca Szilágyi’s language, she soars.”
—Maya Sonenberg
“[Szilágyi’s] work feels like a fairy tale—the sort of thing you’d find handwritten on a tiny scroll . . . under a mushroom in the middle of a forest on the longest day of the year.”
—Seattle Review of Books
“Simultaneously elegiac and remarkably propulsive, Daughters of the Air tells the story of Tatiana (aka Pluta), a girl attempting to break away from her past while being haunted by the memory of her father who was “disappeared” by the Argentine government. The book offers a moving and memorable exploration of how the traumas of history burrow into individuals and fester, sprouting strange and sometimes even lovely phenomena.”
—Peter Mountford, author of A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism and The Dismal Science
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781941360118 |
| PRICE | $18.00 (USD) |
Featured Reviews
Librarian 377318
A gritty and poignant novel about the ways that past trauma trickles into the present and becomes a reverberating, haunting presence. I really liked Szilágyi’s evocative style and her beautiful way of describing Pluta and Isabel’s moral (as well as mortal) conflicts as they grapple with the loss of their former lives. The surrealist elements of the novel are really well written and add a whimsical, fairytale quality to the narrative. Even more, I liked the way that Daniel was not only a victim of a corrupt government, but also the embodiment of longed-for past, a fragmented memory that is more romantic when looked upon from a turbulent present.
Kimberly O, Educator
Pluta, the beleaguered main character, is beset by dirt. The Dirty War in Argentina has stolen her father. Her mother's dirty emotions make her impossible to connect with. Her escape from boarding school leaves her covered in dirt. The Gowanus canal is dirty and so are the streets around it, which Pluta inhabits for a few dirty, freedom filled weeks. Plants grow in dirt, and eventually Pluta does too. She rises above through art - opera, museums, and drawing.
Daughters Of The Air is gritty and dreamy and hard to put down. I will be thinking about Pluta and her story for quite some time.
Bonnye Reed F, Reviewer
Daughters of the Air presents as a dreamscape or fairy tale, and very hard to put down. There are good dreams but also nightmares that you cannot wake from no matter how hard you try. Anca L. Szilagyi paints in atmosphere and location with a delicate brush and her protagonist Pluta is well defined and sympathetic. Her mother Isabel not so much. I thought this to be a most interesting look at the troubles in Argentina in the 1980's. The cover art, "Bird Moon" by Nichole DeMent, is a perfect cover for this surreal tale.
I received a free electronic copy of this novel from Netgalley, Anca L. Szilagyi, and Lanternfish Press in exchange for an honest review. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me.
Readers who liked this book also liked:
Georgina Ferry, Katalin Kariko, Mary Lou Jepsen, Sheri Graner Ray, Amalia Ballarino, Anna Oliveira, Anaïs Engelmann and Meghan Hale, Anda Waluyo Sapardan, Anna Lukasson-Herzig, Brenda Romero, Clarice Phelps, Claudia Brind -Woody, Coty Craven, Emily Holmes, Erica Kang, Gretchen Andrew, Ida Tin, Kasia Gora, Maria Carolina Fujihara, Marita Cheng, Mary Agbesanwa, Morenike Fajemisin, Rumman Chowdhury, Stephanie Willerth, Tan Le, Yewande Akinola
Biographies & Memoirs, Computers & Technology, Science
Publishers Lunch
General Fiction (Adult), Nonfiction (Adult), Teens & YA
