Some Things That Stay

Praise

“What makes [Some Things That Stay] such a prize is precisely the endearing form of dysfunction the family practices, and the voice that reports it…Willis has an unfailing ear for the unsentimental and the loopy.”—Elinor Lipman, The Boston Sunday Globe

“Willis has a fine sense of place. She effectively conjures Tamara’s small world, the half-built bomb shelter by the garden, the Murphys’ house with the rusting cars whose grilles glisten ‘like the teeth of rabid dogs,’ and she taps, with real power, into that most basic human need: a place to call home.” —Chicago Tribune

“Memorable.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Funny.” — Entertainment Weekly

“A bit like a northern Kaye Gibbons, Willis tells a coming-of-age story that is tender and moving. A first novel worth reading.” — Library Journal “Intelligent and moving… Tamara’s uncommonly lucid, honest, and expansive view marks this as a luminous, impressive debut.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A feisty narrator…Tamara is an engaging character.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Willis’s writing is clear and fresh, capturing the emotional edge of childhood and the search for home in one’s heart.” —Library Journal

“Heartfelt…Whenever it would appear that no more successful variations on the American coming-of-age novel remain, an engaging new book arrives. Willis’s is the most recent.” —The Miami Herald

“Set in 1954, this tangy debut is [a] fully imagined coming-of-age story…Even though Willis’s light, funny take turns deeper and more nuanced when Liz contracts tuberculosis and is quarantined in a sanitorium—effectively ending Tamara’s adolescence—the novel never loses its edge.”—Entertainment Weekly