Curtis Sittenfeld meets Katherine Heiny in this irresistible debut about mothers and daughters, the things we carry with us, and those we leave behind
Los Angeles, 2001. Sonia is raising her daughter, Mila, alone in the sunny but somnolent suburbs of LA. Her days are a blur of not-quite-illegal business activities, avoiding other moms, and baking birthday cakes laced with rum- minor mistakes that nevertheless remind her she doesn't belong.
Mila, meanwhile, is juggling violin and swimming lessons and navigating the treacherous social politics of school - all the while trying to get her mother to share something, anything, about her past.
But there are just too many things that Mila doesn't know-
She doesn't know that her mother grew up in Soviet Hungary (where getting your hands on a banana was one of the greatest thrills in life)She doesn't know that her mother has a sister called Rina (whom she hasn't spoken to in 10 years)The only thing she does know about her father is that he was a 'good time' (according to her mother)Crucially, she doesn't know that there is a very good reason why her mother dodges everyone, from traffic cops to vice principals.
So, Mila concocts a scheme to get her mother, and the man Mila is kind of sure must be her father to reconnect. It involves corralling Sonia into chaperoning an orchestra of ten-year-olds (most of whom seem to be called Megan) on a road trip from LA to San Francisco, and it may just cause their carefully constructed lives to implode.
Moving between Budapest before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Washington, DC in the tense years of the Cold War and the bright sunshine of early 2000s Los Angeles, Porcupines is an irresistible novel about mothers and daughters, belonging and reinvention, the things we carry with us, and those we tell ourselves we've left behind.
