Review by Booklist Review
Savaş follows her brilliant novel, The Anthropologists (2024), with a short-story collection shaped by her anthropological understanding that volumes are reflected in our mundane, everyday actions. She portrays millennials on the cusp of the next phase in their lives, whether that's buying a home or exploring new relationships. Populating these tales are richly textured characters struggling to make room for new goalposts while accommodating the old. Regret over youthful mistakes sometimes colors the pictures as well. In "We Are Here," a student studying abroad in Russia misses the true connection she could have accessed during her stay, the one with her aging host. Tinged with aching insecurity, Savaş' characters sometimes question their life choices; their paths are foggy and shaky. The young woman in "Twirl" shuffles through a series of men on dating apps while puzzling over a friendship with an older Turkish expat. She worries that her life is merely "a facade of beautiful objects and luxurious rituals, without any sturdy foundation." The characters may be vulnerable, but they are never overwrought, a balancing act Savaş executes flawlessly. As she makes clear, navigating adulthood with an added sense of rootlessness is not easy, especially in today's world.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Savaş (The Anthropologists) captures the complexities of desire and loss in this gorgeous collection. The moving title story evokes the freshness of a new love affair and the agony of distance, detailing how linguist Lea meets engineer Leo in California before Lea returns to Rome. When they reunite weeks later, their love is bruised by slight arguments and petty jealousy. "The Room," set in Paris, offers another delicately nuanced depiction of an academic, in this case Leyla, who attempts to balance her need for solitude with her work as a tutor, not wanting to be "swept away from her life" by distractions. Savaş is an immensely talented writer, able to convey her characters' circumstances through a sparse economy of words, as evidenced brilliantly in "Practicality," a devastating portrait of a daughter cherishing memories of her deceased mother. In "Twirl," the energetic and thought-provoking closer, an unnamed Turkish woman frenetically busies herself with online dating and befriends Zerrin, a single mother who's recently separated from her partner and lives vicariously through the other's escapades. With unsparing grace, Savaş tenderly illustrates the struggles of her characters as they seek fulfillment. There's much to love in these brilliant stories. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Feelings of disappointment, dislocation, and disconnection permeate novelist Savaş' first story collection. The distancing forces Savaş explores in her 13 stories include time, immigration, motherhood, and grief; all result in a need to reassess a relationship. In "Marseille," Amina, a new mother on a weekend getaway with childless college friends, sees a shift in priorities within the group as they are all forced to begin considering the passage of time. In "Long Distance," two newish lovers dance passive-aggressively around their differing expectations during a trip Leo takes to visit Lea, who's studying in Rome. Another exchange student, in Russia, can't connect with her needy, elderly host mother and can only appreciate the woman's kindnesses in retrospect in "We Are Here." New parents, reeling from the effects of sleep deprivation, receive controversial advice about sleep-training their baby from one friend but feel an even greater sense of disorientation when the same friend treats the atrocities of an ongoing war as something one needs to "have a break from" in "Cry It Out." Upon hearing distressing news about a minor acquaintance, one of Savaş' protagonists muses that the "lives of strangers appeared improbable only because they were seen from a distance." This melancholic assemblage includes episodes of missed connections--on weekend trips, at family gatherings, or over text messages--as characters seek intimacy; or, as in the case of the narrator of "Notions of the Sacred," seek to excuse a breach in a tentative reconnection between friends. Alliances and affections shift, understandings waver, and beliefs are challenged in this collection of stories which individually and collectively convey the difficulties of maintaining connections in a fractured world. Subtle but clearly drawn sketches of the ties that bind and that, inevitably, come undone. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
