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A touching story of the American working-class struggle and motherhood against the odds. Elsie’s language immediately gives us a taste of her sassy voice. A second-generation Lithuanian-American, she is desperate to leave town and escape her parents� blue-collar example, but ends up working at the local Betsy Ross Diner instead. Here she falls for an Albanian line cook named Bashkim. Elsie’s narrative alternates with chapters narrated by her teenage daughter Lulu seventeen years later, in the second person. The novel is set up around two parallel journeys: Elsie’s towards motherhood, and Lulu’s towards the truth about her father. My only misgiving about the novel was the extended use of the second person; I have encountered it in individual short stories or book chapters before but have rarely seen it take such a significant role in the narration of an entire novel. I suspect some readers may find it off-putting.

See my full review at . (See also on Albanian Communism.)