“A sharply provoking woman’s tale and intricate emotional puzzle . . . Poet Gibson’s finely written, mordantly witty, bittersweet first novel portrays a Jewish family at odds with itself and a woman slowly coming into her own during the radical changes of several distinct decades.”—Booklist
"Rebecca Kaiser Gibson writes with a poet’s precision and a novelist’s sense of character as she deftly evokes her narrator’s family, childhood summers, friendships, travels, and love affairs. The result is a radiant and transporting novel which carries the reader along with its wonderful sense of time and place."—Margot Livesey,New York Times bestselling author of The Boy in the Field
“The Promise of a Normal Life is an exquisitely written book. Rebecca Kaiser Gibson's debut follows an unnamed protagonist who often rebels against her dominant and powerful mother by acquiescing to the desires of the men she loves, believing her ability to thrive hinges on compliance. The novel unfolds in a riveting series of experiences that interrogate womanhood, desire, religion, race, and privilege on the path to personal liberation. It is a novel that haunts through restraint.”—Cleyvis Natera, author of Neruda on the Park
“The Promise of a Normal Life is a stunning story beautifully told. With themes of exile, loneliness, and family, it’s a book about the triumph of a human spirit and what we must sometimes go through to reach our destination and find our voice along the way.” —Melissa Scholes Young, author of The Hive and Flood
“A liquid voice describes the tenuous journey of a young, unsure girl into womanhood. Each line is considered, tells a story unto itself. This is pure gold.”—Andy Weinberger, author of the Amos Parisman Mystery Series
“A psychologically captivating tale . . . Rebecca Kaiser-Gibson portrays one of the most interesting and fraught mother-daughter relationships in contemporary literature and offers insights into what it feels like be left on one’s own to develop the scaffolding necessary to support a rich inner life.”—Delia Kostner, PhD, Psychoanalyst, Faculty Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
“The Promise of a Normal Life, with its arresting beauty and candor relayed in lapidary prose, keeps reminding us that its author is a poet. Rebecca Kaiser Gibson has delivered a novel to treasure.”—Jonathan Wilson, author of A Palestine Affair
The Promise of a Normal Life
A Novel
