Porcupines

Maria Semple meets Gary Shteyngart in this wry debut about the Southern California escapades of an unconventional single mother from Budapest and her increasingly inquisitive young daughter, who wakes up one day and decides to find out who her father is.

Los Angeles, 2001. Sonia is a single mother who spends her time running away from PTA moms, engaging in not-quite-illegal business activities involving rich Eastern Europeans and high-tech gadgets, and raising her beloved Milosh, Mila. Cast in her mother’s image, Mila is a precocious, intelligent girl with a burgeoning Shostakovich obsession. The pair live an unconventional life and are, all in all, quite happy together. But Sonia’s guarded life and refusal to discuss their family has left Mila lonely and isolated. When she stumbles across emails between her mother and an unknown man, Mila’s curiosity about her father leads her to form a plan, putting into motion a chain of events that will cause their carefully constructed lives to implode.

Flashback to 1990. The world has begun to breathe again after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Eighteen-year-old Szonja Imre travels to visit her sister in LA in search of the quintessential adventure in the “land of the free.” What she doesn’t expect is the discovery that her sister Rina’s conception of the American dream is vastly different from hers—a lot less Hollywood and more, as Szonja eloquently puts it, “Jewish Stepford Wife.” Rina finds freedom in reconnecting with her roots, but Szonja can’t see how Rina’s new life is less restricted than the one she left behind in Budapest. Their disparate lifestyles lead to conflict, and when Szonja ends up in a difficult situation, she makes a series of snap decisions that leave her navigating America alone as an illegal immigrant.

Taking place across Budapest in the years preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall, DC in the thick of cold war politics, and the bright sunshine of retro LA, Porcupines captures the rich, complex, and entirely absorbing relationships between sisters, mothers, and daughters. At its heart, it is a book about all the ways we find community and companionship, sometimes in the unlikeliest of places. View Less