HOLIDAY COUNTRY

A young woman spending the summer in Turkey becomes entangled with a man from her mother’s past.

“Turkey is, without a doubt, the most beautiful country in the world,” says 19-year-old Ada. She would know: She’s spent every summer there since she was a young child, returning with her Turkish mother, Meltem, to visit her grandmother in a sleepy seaside town, and leaving behind Ada’s father, a successful Silicon Valley tech worker. Though these holidays aren’t exactly idyllic—there’s always tension between Ada’s controlling grandmother and “stoic,” depression-prone Meltem—this summer is particularly fraught. Ada’s father has disclosed an affair, and Meltem is using the time away to decide the marriage’s future. When Levent, an ex-flame of Meltem’s, pops up in town, Ada thinks it could be the perfect chance to matchmake; she’s rooting for her melancholy mother to embrace the life Ada suspects she’s always wished for in Turkey. “It suddenly becomes very important to me that she fall in love with this man, that she reclaim the precision of her vocabulary,” declares Ada. To Ada’s surprise, though, she’s the one who develops feelings for Levent, and her attempts to reach into her mother’s past to alter her future may end up altering Ada’s own irrevocably. In this, her debut, Atrek writes keenly of the liminality of the first-generation American—though Ada is confident and headstrong, her American life with her American boyfriend never seems to fit her, but neither does Turkey, where the language never rolls off her tongue perfectly and cultural touchstones sometimes bewilder her. Despite the collisions of all the characters’ longings, this is a book full of pleasures: Turkish food, the sparkling Aegean, the laze of late summer, and, ultimately, of the difficult mysteries of mothers and daughters.

An elegant portrayal of the overlap between mothers and motherlands.