WAIT

When their undocumented mother is deported, Elise, a recent college graduate, and her younger sister, Sophie, are forced to reboot their lives in this novel set on Nantucket.

Although the central crisis of the novel is Gilda’s deportation to her native Brazil after more than 20 years as a tax-paying resident of the United States, the unfairness of the U.S. immigration system is only one target here. Inequities of class and the often shallow hypocrisy of white liberals also come into play. Gilda supported her girls as a restaurant cook, and Elise grew up as a working-class local on wealthy Nantucket. Sheba, Elise’s best friend from college, is an heiress who likes smoothing Elise’s way financially, whether by lending her clothes or buying her airfare home from Chapel Hill after Gilda was deported the day before their graduation. When the sisters are evicted from the house their mother rented, Sheba invites them to stay in her family’s luxurious summer estate. The friendship, which Elise analyzes in often fascinating detail, is supposedly deep and intimate, but class distinctions are never erasable. Sheba chafes when one of her two mothers parades Elise to her rich friends as her immigration project, but Sheba’s own careless sense of entitlement is on frequent display, particularly when she invites locals to a party that gets seriously out of hand. Oddly, Gilda is a far less developed or interesting character. Applying for a green card to return to Nantucket, she’s sporadically in touch with her kids but mostly concentrates on her new job in Brazil and on reconnecting with her long-lost father, so her immigration status becomes a less compelling issue for readers. Elise’s conflicted relationships with mother, sister, friends, and potential lovers—Burnham also throws in some sexual moments as teasers that don’t add up to much—are more absorbing.

An engaging mixture of psychology and socioeconomics.