Ms. Franqui covers the latent melodrama of this story with the amusing misadventures of the tour. The culture clash is rooted in rules of propriety ... The pleasure of this smart, mild-mannered novel is that, through its juxtapositions, the reader, too, begins to see the country afresh. Pival acutely reflects on the unruly power of Niagara Falls, the deep sadness of the Lincoln Memorial and the contrived prurience of Las Vegas. The novel returns the embattled promise of freedom to the heart of the immigrant’s tale. The old idea that America is where you come to re-create yourself, to live according to your own lights, animates this book like a misplaced truth newly rediscovered.
A tender, funny, wrenching, beautifully executed tale of three lost souls who traverse the chasms of cultural, generational, and geographical divides to forge some bonds strong and true enough to withstand life’s gut punches.”
America for Beginners is a compelling story deepened by characters who grapple with identity and nationality in situations that are sometimes funny, and often painful ... the heart of this novel is Pival’s wrenching self-realization about how she and her culture treated her gay son. We empathize with her sorrow at discovering too late how she might have acted differently. Readers may chafe during the first several chapters, while the plot gets set in motion a bit too slowly ... Still, Franqui's novel resonates as a strong contemporary story about cross-cultural alliances, the bonds of family and what it means to 'learn America.'
Franqui deftly juggles her characters’ competing perspectives, mining small moments in the narrative for larger insights into cultural and personal differences. As they travel west, each character is making an internal journey as well, which is a delight to watch unfold. This is a humorous and heartfelt excursion into the promise that America represents, to both natives and immigrants, and an emotional examination of what that promise means in practice.
America for Beginners by Leah Franqui provides a new twist on this usually aimless, meandering genre: the pre-paid, package-tour novel ... Without the backstory on Pival’s son, this might have been a screwball comedy in the best Bollywood tradition... Luckily, the stories of these characters’ lives, which are woven throughout the novel in flashbacks and asides, are compelling in ways that the tour itself is not.
This is Franqui’s first novel, and it’s tolerable, if not utterly original. She engages in quite a few road trip–novel clichés as well as greenhorn-in-America stereotypes. Worse, she has a habit of overexplaining her characters’ inner lives ... Still, the book is occasionally charming and occasionally engaging; despite everything, you’ll want to find out what happens in the end. Clichés and overexplaining get in the way of the humor and genuine sentiment that this novel strains toward.
