I was a little dubious going in because Lydia Kiesling is famous for running different parts of The Millions, and while her work there is perfectly good and fine, I am always a little suspect of people crossing boundaries to publish novels. A lot of bad novels have been published because of someone’s connection to the literary industry. But at the same time, a lot of good authors have found their in by way of jobs in publishing…William Styron et al.
This is a good novel, fortunately. In fact, I thought it was quite good especially given my tendency to not like a lot of newly published novels with a sense of buzz around them.
A young mother is taking a breather from her everyday life and its stresses by taking her young toddler on a road trip to upstate California (north and away from San Fransisco) where they will visit an older family home newly inherited via a dead grandma. Daphne works for an Islamic studies foundation at a university and her husband is currently in Turkey (he’s Turkish) because of an issue with his Visa, so this trip is not a vacation, nor is it a purely necessary trip for financial or other reasons. But it’s a way to step out, and at the start of the novel, it’s unclear how long that will be.
There have been a lot of novels about motherhood published in the last few years, and a lot of those tend to be about the phenomenon itself and how it plays tricks on your brain and psyche. But this novel is about being a mother in the realest sense. It’s “raw” as the cover states in the sense that there’s a pretty clear line between Daphne’s thoughts and feelings and our reading, but it’s not a kind of poverty porn that comes with, say, a lot of Southern literature. It’s a well-told, honest novel that has a clearly planned and thoughtful structure.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Golden-State-Novel-Lydia-Kiesling/dp/0374164835/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1548940061&sr=8-1&keywords=the+golden+state+lydia+kiesling)
