Publishers Weekly
★ 11/28/2022
In Angel-Ajani’s piercing debut novel (after the nonfiction narrative Strange Trade), a mother and daughter are emotionally paralyzed by the fear of failing each other. After a childhood spent on the move, 16-year-old Lara is no stranger to starting over. So when she and her single mother, Yevgenia, a Russian immigrant, land in a dilapidated mobile home park in the California desert, Lara thinks she knows what to expect. Yevgenia, a bartender, leads a promiscuous sex life and pays more attention to her customers and Lara’s friends than to Lara. Yevgenia’s also full of opinions on Russian literature, love, and sex—all things Lara knows nothing about, despite continually reading the notebooks full of prescriptive pronouncements Yevgenia has compiled for her. Lara is convinced Yevgenia is ashamed of her for being biracial (her father, who disappeared from their lives, was a Black musician) and fears that following her mother’s advice will mean following in Yevgenia’s meandering footsteps. Meanwhile, a Black classmate jokingly discourages Lara from trying to find her father (“That you don’t have a father is the Blackest thing about you.... And your obsession and longing for him is the whitest”). But after a man attacks Lara, she realizes Yevgenia’s motivations are far more complicated—and that Lara herself might need to make difficult choices to set them both free. In perceptive prose and wry dialogue, Angel-Ajani brings to life a mother and daughter trapped by their circumstances. This is exemplary. Agent: Julia Eagleton, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
A Country You Can Leave is a master class of a bildungsroman... Like childhood, Angel-Ajani’s novel is alternately horrifying and spellbinding in its lessons about love, family and growing up."
—Angela Lashbrook, The New York Times
"Asale Angel-Ajani’s prismatic debut, A Country You Can Leave is truly unforgettable."
—Rachel León, The Millions
"Angel-Ajani’s unflinching portrait of this hypernuclear family is captivating and complex, with a richly drawn supporting cast and occasional arch humor that leavens the intensely emotional backdrop."
—Thane Tierney, BookPage (starred review)
"The tensions between teenage Lara and her Russian-born mother Yevgenia sizzle in Asale Angel-Ajani’s wry and tumultuous first novel.... A Country You Can Leave is filled with passion and humor, rawness and loss; it is a fresh and vivid reminder of how good storytelling works."
—Jane Ciabattari, Literary Hub
"[A] piercing debut novel . . . In perceptive prose and wry dialogue, Angel-Ajani brings to life a mother and daughter trapped by their circumstances. This is exemplary."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[A] sharp, observant debut novel, which deftly blends humor and hard truths while examining economic inequities and the emotional toll they take."
—Kirkus
"Angel-Ajani captures a delicate mother-daughter relationship that is fissured from both internal and external forces... A Country You Can Leave is about love in the face of American precarity, oppression, and violence."
—Sarah Neilson, Shondaland
"This remarkable debut focuses on the turbulent and complicated relationship between a Black, biracial teen and her erratic, fierce Russian mother... [it's a] gripping coming-of-age novel."
—Margaret Kingsbury, BuzzFeed News
"A tour de force of character, and a captivating story to match. Vivid, tender and unflinching, I loved this journey. "
—Ann-Marie MacDonald, author of Fayne
“A Country You Can Leave is an enthralling and heartfelt novel. In this striking debut, Asale Angel-Ajani’s phenomenal skills shine on every page. This book will leave you profoundly moved and feeling like you better understand the word loneliness.”
—Sarah Jackson, author of A Bit Much
“A Country You Can Leave shattered me with its pain and sweetness. At its heart are a mother and daughter like none I’ve read before, each striving for selfhood in a world that seems bent on crushing them. It’s rare to encounter a debut so fearless and insightful and truly new, but here is Asale Angel-Ajani to show us what’s possible in the landscape of American fiction.”
—Tania James, author of The Tusk That Did the Damage
"A journey through the California everyone should know, a place America needs to see, a world of desperation and beauty, collaboration and redemption. In the best tradition of fiercely perceptive daughters fighting to survive dangerous lives, from Betty Smith to Janet Fitch to Helena Maria Viramontes, the debut of Asale Angel-Ajani was ever surprising, a novel I read in one day."
—Susan Straight, author of Mecca
"From page one, A Country You Can Leave is a riveting, exasperating, and deeply heartbreaking tale of mother-daughter strife and resilience. Asale Angel-Ajani is an explosive talent and her story of Afro-Cuban Lara coming of age in a ruthless headlock with her survivalist Russian mother, Yevgenia, will disintegrate your strong-held emotional walls, down to her very last act of resistance."
—Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Olga Dies Dreaming
"Refined and raw, cosmopolitan and claustrophobic, A Country You Can Leave is a novel of contrasts, built around a mother and daughter who see themselves as nothing alike. Asale Angel-Ajani portrays the complexity of the whole world through this one core relationship. Her debut is as loving as it is demanding, as vulnerable as it is merciless, and its complications will break your heart."
—Julia Phillips , author of Disappearing Earth
Kirkus Reviews
2022-12-24
A Black, biracial teen and her Russian mother navigate their tumultuous relationship in a California desert trailer park.
She’s Black and her mother is Russian, and the gulf between them is as wide, hot, and seemingly impenetrable as the Mojave Desert, but 16-year-old Lara Montoya-Borislava knows what people expect of her: “Girls like me end up being girls like my mother.” Lara is not much like Yevgenia, she doesn’t think, but the circumstances of their lives keep throwing them up against each other, testing that theory and fraying the rough edges of their relationship. A peripatetic life of poverty as Yevgenia moves from one man to the next has landed them in the blast furnace of the Oasis Mobile Estates, a trailer park in the California desert, where Lara begins to confront the question of whether she will follow her mother’s scorched-earth path. The focus of this sharp, observant debut novel, which deftly blends humor and hard truths while examining economic inequities and the emotional toll they take, is the fraught mother-daughter connection, the push and pull between Yevgenia, who spouts grand ideas about love, men, and casual sex, and Lara, who is taking her first real steps toward adulthood. The women clash on many fronts, Yevgenia arguing that class divisions loom larger in America than racial divides, while Lara bears the brunt of casual racism. When Lara finds herself attracted to a handsome older neighbor, their battles escalate. On occasion Yevgenia seems too colorful to be true—writing down life lessons in a book for the daughter she periodically abandons seems out of character for her, as do her frequent taunts about her daughter’s sexual inexperience—and a side plot about Lara’s quickly abandoned search for her Cuban father feels superfluous. But Angel-Ajani makes you care about Lara’s tentative steps to a hard-won freedom.
Sharp observations and insights about a stormy mother-daughter bond and a bracing examination of poverty in America.
