In the winter of 1952, twenty years before she publishes her first novel, just on the brink of a precipitous decline into poverty, and pregnant with her third child, the not-yet-renowned British author Penelope Fitzgerald goes to Fonseca, Mexico, with her young son Valpy at the invitation of two widowed sisters whose silver mine she hopes will be her family's saving grace. Her husband struggles with alcoholism, their literary journal is on the brink, and this is Penelope's last-ditch effort to secure material support. Financial desperation is a moral quandary for Penelope, who reveres the religious and scholarly ascetics that populate her family tree. But she longs to begin her own writing life.
Spare, absorbing ... A welcome diversion from our rage-soaked, polarized culture: a fable with heart and a searching investigation into what makes a marriage endure ... A book brimming with entangled fiction, history, and biography, the unexpected treasures a writer unearths at the convergence of genres. Kane is true to the muse at the center of her novel, highlighting not only Penelope Fitzgerald’s stature and vision but also the necessity of literature in an era of university budget cuts and social-media distractions.
Deliciously wry ... A marvel of sharp concision ... Reads like a cross between a daffy British house-party novel and a bizarre Wes Anderson film bedecked with local color ... It’s hard to keep all the zany characters straight ... Fonseca will have you adding Fitzgerald’s books to your to-read pile, with Offshore at the top.
Though Fonseca might not do justice to Fitzgerald’s trademark style — a very high bar — it is a sensitive and poignant chronicle of her unusual creative path ... Painstakingly faithful to Fitzgerald’s interests and work ... Kane sometimes deals herself a similar hand but overplays it, depicting events as if they occur as whimsically as Fitzgerald might imagine them on the page ... A refreshingly guilt-free entry in the literature of working moms ... Shrugging off rigid expectations of mothers, Kane explores the more interesting question of what transformation looks like for a woman who is tightly tethered to family life but just beginning her literary journey.
