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A searing debut novel from one of the most imaginative minds in fiction
Kelly Luce's Pull Me Under tells the story of Rio Silvestri, who, when she was twelve years old, fatally stabbed a school bully. Rio, born Chizuru Akitani, is the Japanese American daughter of the revered violinist Hiro Akitani--a Living National Treasure in Japan and a man Rio hasn't spoken to since she left her home country for the United States (and a new identity) after her violent crime.
Her father's death, along with a mysterious package that arrives on her doorstep in Boulder, Colorado, spurs her to return to Japan for the first time in twenty years. There she is forced to confront her past in ways she never imagined, pushing herself, her relationships with her husband and daughter, and her own sense of who she is to the brink.
The novel's illuminating and palpably atmospheric descriptions of Japan and its culture, as well its elegantly dynamic structure, call to mind both Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being and David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars. Pull Me Under is gripping, psychologically complex fiction--at the heart of which is an affecting exploration of home, self-acceptance, and the limits of forgiveness.
"Luce deftly evokes Japan without exoticizing it, though a structure heavy on flashback undercuts too much of the drama. But the final act is the novel's strongest and most confident, weaving the book's threads together and leaving a lasting reverberation." - Publishers Weekly
"Understated yet emotionally gripping, Luce's novel is an intimate portrayal of one woman's search for identity." - Booklist
"A potentially interesting story sapped of interest by slow pacing and lack of character development." - Kirkus Reviews
Kelly Luce makes a persuasive case for why she should be one of your favorite new short-story writers." - San Francisco Chronicle
"Luce has created a collection in which the donning of soft skins, naked or furred, is both an act of love and an expression of the unremitting strangeness of the self." - Chicago Tribune
"Kelly Luce's debut novel is an urgent and wise story about the many disparate identities a life can hold, but it is also an astonishing example of all that a novel can encompass ... In this novel, Luce offers many poignant, page-turning pleasures, but her greatest gift to the reader is her revelation of how a single life, a single mind, a single, artful book can contain multitudes." - Stefan Merrill Block
"The writing of Kelly Luce is beautifully stark and simple, and at the same time playful, earthy, and violent. She's unique, a natural born writer, and Pull Me Under is a strange and very appealing novel, a journey to Japan and the primal scene of the main character's self— which, like a volcano, may have already blown its top." - Rachel Kushner
"Kelly Luce's unforgettable debut is an elegant mystery, a tender story of family and forgiveness, an unsettling depiction of the darkness we each carry inside, and a hymn to Japan ... From its first sentence, Pull Me Under grabs the reader and doesn't let go." - Sarah Bird, author of Above the East China Sea
"Kelly Luce's hypnotic debut. Pull Me Under is a fierce and suspenseful exploration of the profoundly mysterious nature of identity, written with precise and spectacular beauty. Kelly Luce is one of our most thrilling new talents." - Laura van den Berg
"Kelly Luce's stories render memorably and with deadpan understatement their protagonists' obsessive combinations of longing and grief and bafflement in the face of their loved ones' emotional requirements, even as their worlds slip seamlessly into the uncanny. These stories unsettle as much as they entertain." - Jim Shepard
"Kelly Luce writes stories whose charm is a lasting effect. Her work is witty, unpredictable, and freshly written. There's a genuine imagination at work here that is a delight to spend time with." - Stuart Dybek
"In Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, Kelly Luce manages the impossible: each story delicate and enormous, intricate, glitteringly beautiful, never less than strange, never less than profound, ten spiderwebs astonishingly spun. Readers: here is your new favorite short story writer." - Elizabeth McCracken
"Luce's debut novel is psychologically seductive, and the prose draws the reader into its loneliness. Pull Me Under shines brightest as an inquest into whether a split psyche can ever be made whole once the past becomes its own foreign country–and the tyranny of being taught that a dark past is not to be trespassed upon." - Ploughshares
This information about Pull Me Under was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kelly Luce is the author of Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail (2013), which won Foreword Reviews's 2013 Editor's Choice Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for book prizes from the Texas Institute of Letters and the Writers' League of Texas. Her work has been honored by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, Jentel Arts, Tin House, and the Sewanee Writer's Conference, and has recently appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, New England Review, American Short Fiction, and other publications. She was a Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, where she received her MFA. She lives in Northern California.
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