DEFENESTRATE

A twin brother and sister work to overcome their family's superstition as well as their own personal demons.

Marta and Nick were brought up by their mother with a warning about a tendency for people in their family to be gravely injured or killed by falls. It all began when a great-great-grandfather pushed a stonemason out a window in Prague, an act known as defenestration, which forced him to flee to the American Midwest and seems to have led to an uncanny string of falls in the family. Their father’s love provided levity for the twins and balanced out their strictly religious mother’s dogma, but after Nick graduates from college and tells his parents he's gay, his mother kicks him out, and the family is irrevocably changed. Told through brief vignettes from Marta's first-person perspective, the story recounts how the twins went to live in Prague and attempted to make sense of their upbringing and obsession with falling. In the current timeline, Marta visits Nick in the hospital after his own fall and remeets her mother after years of estrangement. Branum makes excellent use of the fragmented structure of her debut novel, offering meditations on Prague’s rich history and architecture; Buster Keaton and his theatrical falls, as well as other historical people who famously survived falls; the difficulties of close relationships that define you but also bind you; and the complicated legacies of family stories that defy clarity or comfort. Even as Marta’s own well-being depends on her finding an ability to heal separately from Nick, she muses on this unknowability: “I know then, with a shiver of certainty, that sometimes a story can have a meaning for the teller that no one else, no matter how many times they hear it, can unearth.”

A serious story, luminously told.