PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleFeast Days is a book about the haves and have-nots told from the point of view of the haves. For all their differences, the expats share an important bond with their Brazilian hosts: the common language of capital gains and wine lists. Yet for all their luxuries, Emma and her husband lack one vital status symbol: a child to dote on ... Using thin brushstrokes, inventive turns of phrase, and fragmentary, dialogue-heavy sections, he deftly captures how an outsider is only able to comprehend a country in pieces, assembling an incomplete puzzle over time. What holds this portrait of a marriage together, across time and across continents, is Emma’s voice. Wry and melancholy, she is a sensitive weather vane to the changing winds in her own relationships, and to the storm brewing in a country that she wants desperately to make sense of, if only to understand how she ended up in Brazil in the first place. MacKenzie’s slender novel feels heavier than many novels twice its weight, dramatizing what it’s like for the wealthy to live with the poor in the corner of their eye.
