When We Get There Book

Over the course of one winter in 1974, in the coal-mining town of Banning, Pennsylvania, the youngest member of a large and boisterous Eastern European family gives himself a tall order: to find his mother, who recently disappeared without explanation. Lucas, an only child whose father died several years earlier in a coa-mine blast, lives with the legacy of loss. Despite his heavy inheritance, Lucas is still just a thirteen-year-old boy puzzling out the world around him. He shuttles between the homes of his family elders whose old-world ways he can't quite understand. When Zoli, his mother's embittered admirer, takes it upon himself to find his lost love, violence and retribution escalate until no one, especially Lucas, is safe. As he struggles to find his place in this unsettling landscape, Lucas's extended family and close-knit ethnic community circle around him. Set against the collapse of the industry that has sustained the family and the town for generations, When We Get There is a startling tale of one family's long winter—and the spring that eventually comes hard on winter's heels.

The New York Times - John Freeman

…When We Get There is a coming-of-age story with mythic undertones. As winter glides into early summer, Lucas amasses a collection of maps and stories to guide his search for his mother. Many of the tales have nothing to do with Mirjana, but they give a vivid sense of the family's origins. We learn that Lucas was named after his great-uncle Lukacs, a Hungarian who died when he tried to cure a fever by running out into the snow, and that his great-grandfather once wrestled bears in a circus that traveled through the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These stories unfold piecemeal, out of chronological order, and Seliy parcels out some crucial tales, such as how Lucas's father died, over several chapters, so a reader has to dig just like Lucas to understand what set his mother's escape plan in motion. This disjointed structure would be irritating if Seliy didn't have such a firm grasp of when her story needs to be grounded and when it can take flight.