EVERYBODY SAYS IT'S EVERYTHING

A set of adopted twins have a lot to discover about their Albanian heritage and themselves.

Drita and Petrit “Pete” DiMeo, the brother and sister at the center of Aliu’s perceptive, poignant second novel, couldn’t be more different. She is an academically gifted achiever who made it out of their hard-luck hometown of Waterbury, Connecticut, through work and determination, going first to an in-state university, because it was affordable, and then to graduate school at Columbia University, because she could. Drita has a nursing degree and is studying public health, determined to help the world, but after Jackie, their adoptive mother, suffers a stroke, Drita returns to help her and to work as a visiting nurse in the town she thought she’d left behind. Pete, meanwhile, is a charming ne’er-do-well, a hard-drinking heartbreaker who skipped town with his drug-abusing girlfriend, Shanda, and their sweet-spirited young son, Dakota, and then let shame keep him away from his family. When Pete falls in with a group of Albanians in the Bronx organizing on behalf of the Kosovo Liberation Army and Shanda and Dakota turn up on Drita’s proverbial doorstep, each of the twins begins to learn more about their family and identity, each other and themselves, lessons more complex than they first seemed. As she did in her debut, Brass (2018), also set in Waterbury, Aliu tells us an American story with Albanian inflections, deftly toggles time and perspective, and introduces characters—not only Drita and Pete, but also Jackie, Shanda, and others—the reader will not soon forget. Writing with warmth and sensitivity, compassion and a clear-eyed command of the narrative, she brings empathy and generosity to these characters’ experiences—their disappointments and hopes, the questionable choices they make and the consequences of those decisions that they, and we, may not have predicted.

Family is about more than blood in this tenderhearted and touching novel—a riveting read.