Allison Larkin

Freya Arnalds is thirty years old and running on fumes — bartending in Maine, drinking too much, living alone in a shabby apartment with not much holding her together. When her appendix bursts and lands her in the hospital, she returns home to find an eviction notice on the door. With nowhere else to go, she drives back to Somers, New York, the small suburban town she fled years ago, where her recently deceased parents left her their crumbling house. Her sister Steena got the money. Freya show more got the property — decaying, leaking, a lot of problems she doesn't have the resources to fix.
She was planning to lay low. That plan falls apart immediately when she discovers her fifteen-year-old niece Aubrey has been secretly living in the derelict house, apparently on her own. Aubrey is Steena's daughter — and Steena, Freya's cruel half-sister, is as much a product of their dysfunctional family as Freya is, just aimed in a different direction. As Freya and Aubrey begin the slow work of repairing the house together — literally patching walls, fixing the roof — they're also navigating years of separation and the painful history that caused it. Old friends resurface, old flames reappear, and the whole messy community of Somers closes back around Freya whether she wants it to or not. Somers, incidentally, is the actual historical birthplace of the American circus, and the legend of Old Bet — a circus elephant once paraded through town — threads through the novel as a recurring motif about captivity, spectacle, and histories that get told wrong. The novel is set in 2007. Aubrey has a pet rat named Lenny Juice and a temperamental cat named Coriolanus.

[May contain spoilers]
The reason Freya left Somers is revealed slowly — the full weight of her parents' dysfunction and Steena's cruelty becomes clear as the novel unfolds, and the events that pulled Freya and Aubrey apart involve abuse cycles that Freya is now determined to interrupt for Aubrey's sake. The house renovation is an explicit metaphor for both women rebuilding themselves. The found family that forms around Freya — old friend Jam, Hans, Bee, Eddie — becomes the support system that biological family never was. Lenny Juice the rat dies and receives a Viking funeral that becomes an unexpectedly communal moment of grief. The ending is warm and earned without being tidy.
What I think: This is firmly in the territory of The Bright Years and All the Lonely People — character-driven, warm-hearted, emotionally precise, with found family at its core and a protagonist you'd follow anywhere. The Maine-then-New York setting gives it good American texture. The house-as-metaphor is used with restraint rather than hammered home. Probably a strong 4 from you — exactly your kind of book. show less

Well-written saga with true characters that elevates this a little above the typical 'found family' story. It's about the family we create when the one we start with fails us. Epicly. April Sawick is maybe 10 when her father moves with her to an abandoned motor home on a remote piece of property in Little River, upstate New York. And she is 16 when he leaves her there alone to move in with a new girlfriend in town. Her mother left when she was 6, so that is her gritty beginning. The town show more doesn't have much to offer. Margo who runs the diner looks after April and eventually employs here. Her boyfriend Matty wants them to get married and settle down, but April has dreams of music and movement - away. When things get volatile with her father, she hits the road with the girlfriend's car, and no one comes after her. Thus begins her drifting lifestyle with varied success and various relationships for the next three years. She 'keeps' some worthwhile people, but always on her own terms and usually in retrospect after she has moved on. Margo remains a constant - an every Sunday phone call so someone knows she is alive. And she gets in plenty of situations where that is warranted. Lots of cringey moments - the 25 year old she moves in with at her very first stop, when she is still 16. Meeting up with Matty again, (now Matthew) who became a soap opera star. Road tripping with a college student she would see every few months. Some moments are so starkly true and raw - the fact that April never learned how to have friends in her childhood. And others are a little full-blown. Her final stop is unexpected, but not - potential for a sequel? But also the chance to keep the right people for the right reasons. show less

April Sawicki was abandoned by her mother when she was just six years old. From there, her life has only gotten worse to the point that, at sixteen years old, she is living in a seedy trailer park in a motorhome that doesn't even have an engine. Her emotionally absent father has also spent the past several months also being physically absent, living with another woman, Irene, and fathering her young son, while failing to even provide April with the basic necessities like food. She works show more part-time at the local diner owned by Margo, who is her friend and surrogate mother. Margo cares deeply for April and understands her father well, having dated him in high school and again after April's mother left. "Your father's a good man, April. He always means to be a good man," Margo explained when telling April that she was breaking up with her father, but not her. "He just . . . he gets in the way of himself, you know?" Margo and the diner give April a place where she can retreat, feel safe, and talk about life and her future. April is flunking her classes, but is completely enthralled with the old guitar her father gave her as a birthday present. She taught herself to paly and is and writing her own songs.

One night April finds the courage to hotwire her elderly neighbor's car and attend open mic night at the Blue Moon Cafe. She performs two of her original songs -- one about losing her virginity to her boyfriend, Matty, and another about her father ("Don't forget you made me. Don't forget you made me the way I am"). The audience loves her. She returns to the motorhome, curls up in the driver's seat to sleep . . . and fails her math test the next day. She decides to quit school and is offered a steady Friday night gig at the Blue Moon. But April discovers her father's secrets and they prove how little he cares about her. In a fit of anger, he breaks her guitar. After another argument, April has had enough. She steals her father's car and heads to Matty's house "one last time" with the knowledge that their discussions about marriage were not realistic. Because if she stays, she "will always be a body at rest" rather than the person she is meant to be. So with any possessions she figures will prove useful shoved into a garbage bag and thrown into the car, along with her mother's ring and a hundred and seventy-eight dollars saved from working at the diner, she drives on an interstate highway for the first time . . . with Little River and her little life there in her rearview mirror.

She sees a sign indicating that Ithaca is forty-one miles away. "I feel like the sign for Ithaca is fate or something close to it," April relates in the first-person narration Larkin employs to tell her story. She finds a dirty campground where she can spend the night, and in the morning walks into town. The Cafe Decadence has a "help wanted" sign in the window and the owner, Carly, hires her on the spot.

Thus begins April's journey to discover who she really is, what matters most to her, a place to belong, and people she can love and be loved by. Her first stop is Ithaca, but when her time there comes to a heart-wrenching end, even though it is the place where she makes her "first true friend," she hits the road again. Along the way, music sustains her spirit and feeds her soul, and she carves out a unique career as a singer-songwriter. She loves hearing her favorite sounds -- "“the click of the strap buckle against the guitar, pop of the mic as I switch it on, the way the strings of the guitar vibrate ever so slightly when I rest it on my leg.” She records and sells her CD's at the various venues where she performs and, over time, her music also "comes with its own chains. Leaves me pulled apart and spread too thin." It doesn't provide the freedom she dreamed about. Several times she lands in places where she thinks maybe she "could really fit" but when things do not work out, she resumes her nomadic life even as it "gets harder and harder to follow the road" and she decides she's "done with wanting what can't be mine."

But April presses on, despite loneliness, longing, and disappointment. She is a deeply sympathetic character, because her struggle is one that is universally understood and to which readers can readily relate. April's parents displayed the worst kind of callous disregard for her well-being. Her mother left her with her father who lacks the capacity to love and, worse, be present in his daughter's life. Rather than care for her, he gets involved with Irene, lavishing his attention on her son and fathers another child with her, leaving April to fend for herself in the motorless motorhome that has holes in the floorboard. April, with the unconditional support of Margo, figures out how to survive in Little River, but life there is too confining and finite for her. She summons the strength to escape, but, as she explains, she has never had a real friend or traveled, and she is unprepared for the challenges she encounters on her own. She is naive and she gets used, but she is a fast learner.

Larkin's choice to set the story in the 1990's -- a decade that seems, in retrospect, so much simpler and less complicated than today, in part because there was no social media -- and let April tell her story in her own words is highly effective. Larkin's straight-forward, unembellished writing style enhances the tale's emotional resonance. Because readers are privy to April's inner dialogue in which she voices all of her fears, insecurities, dreams, and desires, readers don't merely understand her journey. Rather, April embeds herself in reader's hearts at the very beginning of the story and continues residing there -- as she has lived in Larkin's consciousness since 2006 -- taking readers with her on her sojourn as she learns about what it means to really love another person ("It's easy to fall in love with someone hen you need them, but that doesn't make it real or right"), love herself, and be simultaneously self-reliant and able to make room in her life for others to love her. After great internal turmoil, April reconciles, in her own way, with her father, finally appreciative of and embracing Margo's wise explanation about his shortcomings. "It wasn't about me at all. He did what was easy. He didn't have it in him to do any better." She also figures out that she does not have to grow up to be like her parents, destined to make the same mistakes, but she can instead make different choices and conduct her life far differently. Ultimately, she learns how to let people love her and that those are the people she wants to keep in her life.

The People We Keep is a poignant coming-of-age story of one indomitable young woman who instinctually recognizes that her life is not meant to forever be limited and constrained by her circumstances. Rather, she summons her innate inner resources to explore the world and the people who inhabit it in a quest to find what makes her happy and fills her spirit up. Along the way, she learns painful, often heartbreaking truths about herself, the people she meets along the way, and how the world operates, as she searches for what her parents never gave her: a home and all it symbolizes. "A real place with a floor that isn't on wheels, where there aren't any lies left to catch up with me."

In The People We Keep, Larkin compassionately details April's examination of and quest for what and who matter to her life. She hopes April's story will serve as a reminder to readers to take a moment and "think about the people in their life who have been an enduring part of it in healthy and happy ways." Because for all of us, those are the people we keep.

Thanks to NetGalley for an Advance Reader's Copy of the book. show less

The People We Keep is a charming, though often heartbreaking, story, of a young woman who raised herself. Both her parents were alive, but her mother left long ago and her dad moved in with his girlfriend, leaving April to raise herself. Luckily, her dad’s ex-girlfriend didn’t break up with April when she broke up with her dad. Margo is there with support and love and a job waiting tables after school

But April is a singer/songwriter and school is getting in the way of her future. When show more her father, in a moment of anger, breaks her guitar, April takes his car and hits the road. Over the next several years she finds love, friendship, and heartbreak. She also builds a following and a routine traversing the eastern seaboard, calling home to Margo so she won’t worry.

She was sixteen when she hit the road and lying about her age and her history is second nature. She fears if she is honest, she will lose people, but when she finally finds someone who knows her whole story and they still love her, well that is a real crisis because she has a new reason to lie

I loved The People We Keep. How many of us know people who expect to be left, so they leave first? They might be good with casual friendships, but the experience of abandonment as a child has left them unable to trust love. After all, if your own parents who are obligated to love you unconditionally abandon you, what can you expect from anyone else. This is so real.

And so as a reader, I found myself telling April to give people a chance, don’t go, tell them your problem and you will see they still love you. But as a person who has seen this in action, no about of telling someone they are loved and valuable can fix what was broken until people find a way to accept their past.

This story felt emotionally authentic which is why it was so often heartbreaking.

I received an ARC of The People We Keep from the publisher through Shelf Awareness

The People We Keep at Gallery Books | Simon & Schuster
Allison Larkin author site

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2021/08/06/9781982171292/ show less