Porcupines Audiobook By Fran Fabriczki cover art

Porcupines

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Porcupines

By: Fran Fabriczki
Narrated by: Stephanie Németh-Parker
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NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK BY VOGUE

“If Gilmore Girls had sharper edges and came with a Los Angeles sunburn, you’d have this riveting novel, a love letter to kids who are done keeping their parents’ secrets.” —Courtney Maum, author of I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You

A fresh and witty debut about a young immigrant mother and her increasingly inquisitive daughter, who wakes up one day and decides to find out who her father is.

Sonia is a Hungarian immigrant who is raising her daughter, Mila—her beloved Milosh—on her own in sunny Los Angeles. Her days are a blur of not-quite-illegal business activities, dodging PTA moms, and baking birthday cakes laced with rum—minor mistakes that nevertheless continually remind her of everything she doesn’t understand about America and parenthood. Mila, meanwhile, is juggling violin and swimming lessons and navigating the treacherous social politics of school with the help of a less-than-helpful guidebook on how to be cool in the sixth grade—all the while trying to get her secretive mother to share something, anything, about her past.

Sonia is sure that their bond, stitched from drive-through dinners, extracurricular activities, and a lot of exasperated affection for each other—will be enough to satisfy her daughter. But her guarded lifestyle has left Mila lonely, isolated, and ready to write herself into a bigger story. When she stumbles across emails between her mother and a man she’s never met, Mila decides to take matters into her own hands and forms a plan that will implode their carefully constructed lives.

Moving between Budapest before the fall of the Berlin Wall; Washington, DC, in the tense years of the Cold War; and the bright sunshine of early aughts Los Angeles, Porcupines is an irresistible novel about mothers and daughters, secrecy and loneliness, belonging and reinvention—and what happens when the truth can’t be held back any longer. Family Life Genre Fiction Literature & Fiction World Literature Witty
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Critic reviews

"Németh-Parker’s narration evokes the push-pull of a mother-daughter duo in the early 2000s."
"Sonia is a quick-witted single mother who keeps her cards close to her chest. When Sonia speaks, Stephanie Németh-Parker’s intonation is light and playful; when her daughter, Mila, speaks, her narration is flat and humorless. In this way, listeners will note the contrasting personalities of mother and daughter. Németh-Parker gives distinctive voices to Sonia’s early friends, family members, and parental acquaintances, layering the complex relationships in Sonia’s life. But her performance of the narrative is less varied, doing little to create tension or suspense. Still, there’s no denying the perfect storm that Mila creates when she sends an email from Sonia’s inbox in a stunt reminiscent of The Parent Trap."
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