DaveNash3 reviewed Brass: a novel by Xhenet Aliu
Review of 'Brass' on 'Storygraph'
4 stars
I enjoyed the storytelling and writing. Here are two of my favorite sentences, both on the same page.
"She said that being in the kitchen at the Ross was like working at a funeral home, but I doubt that the funeral home workers saw their failure in the faces of the corpses they stared into every day."
"I understood it. They were embarrassed. They’d been duped. It was easy to recognize on the other people, but it wore disguises when you looked into the mirror."
Aliu alternates narrators between mother and daughter. The mother tells the story of her daughter's conception and birth, the daughter tells the story of the hunt for her father. The mother's story reveals how the father was separated. Since we know from the second chapter that her daughter was born and her father left, the mother's story is less interesting than the daughter's but Aliu's …
I enjoyed the storytelling and writing. Here are two of my favorite sentences, both on the same page.
"She said that being in the kitchen at the Ross was like working at a funeral home, but I doubt that the funeral home workers saw their failure in the faces of the corpses they stared into every day."
"I understood it. They were embarrassed. They’d been duped. It was easy to recognize on the other people, but it wore disguises when you looked into the mirror."
Aliu alternates narrators between mother and daughter. The mother tells the story of her daughter's conception and birth, the daughter tells the story of the hunt for her father. The mother's story reveals how the father was separated. Since we know from the second chapter that her daughter was born and her father left, the mother's story is less interesting than the daughter's but Aliu's alternation keeps the dream alive.
I've driven through Waterbury CT on 84 many many times, I never stopped and I never knew that it prided itself on being the brass valley. It's like a big deal on their official city website. So there is a rust belt thing going on with the immigrant thing with the fiction of paternity and the mother-daughter relationship. Lots to keep you entertained for almost 300 pages.
