Description
Book SynopsisOne night, Agatha Winter''s phone rings. Jasmine, her 13-year-old sister, has run away from home and needs to be picked up at the bus terminal. It''s the anniversary of their mother''s accident and subsequent split from the family. Jasmine is determined to exact revenge. Their mother, now a flashy self-help guru under a new moniker, preaches willing amnesia: liberation by deliberately forgetting and disowning the past.
But willing amnesia is no innovation: it runs in the family. The girls'' grandmother and great-grandmother, both Holocaust survivors, have found their own superficially innocuous yet fiercely destructive ways to fend off memory. In separate struggles, the girls work to break free from the burden of their family''s silence.
Told in three major and two minor voices, Cricket in a Fist offers sophisticated psychological insight. Lewis''s rich command of language transports us into a world of richly imagined characters.
Trade Review"In her passionately felt first novel, Naomi K. Lewis explores how the Holocaust distorts the lives of surviving generations.
Cricket in a Fist asks difficult questions about personal freedom and the long arm of the past." -- Martha Bailie
"
Cricket in a Fist lays a handful of fingers on what goes wrong when we are young. There's a whole family of trouble beating here, and Naomi K. Lewis gives voice to it all — a smartly structured, tender, and candid first novel." -- Michael Winter
