Holiday Country

August 1, 2023

For California-based Ada, her mother's family villa on the Turkish coast is just Holiday Country, yet she can't help but wonder how her mother's life might have turned out had she not left, especially when an intriguing man from her mother's past shows up; from debuter Atrek (100,000-copy first printing). Prepub Alert.

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October 2, 2023
A young Turkish American woman comes of age during an annual visit to her family’s Aegean villa in Atrek’s engrossing debut. Ada, 19, and her mother, Meltem, are spending the summer with Ada’s grandmother, where Ada delights each year in shedding her California skin and the days are delineated mostly by her deepening tan. This year, however, her parents’ marriage is on the brink of collapse, prompting Ada to consider her mother anew. She worries, for one thing, that Meltem’s divided nationalities have dulled her personality (“How easily language can slip away after years abroad.... Just one more thing my father has taken from her,” Ada thinks as she listens to her mother fumble in her native Turkish). When Ada meets Levent, a handsome former lover of Meltem’s from her younger years in Istanbul, she tries to nudge them into an affair, believing it would restore the shine of Meltem’s youth. Nothing happens between them, though, and after Levent announces he’s returning to Istanbul, Ada, by now interested in pursuing her own romance with him, schemes a way to join him. This development strains credulity, and the story gallops toward a scandalous if too-tidy conclusion. Still, Atrek gloriously portrays the seaside setting, and she expertly explores the crackling tension between mother and daughter. This finely rendered debut heralds the arrival of a smart, bold voice. Agent: Andrea Blatt, WME.

Starred review from November 1, 2023
Since she was a small child, Ada has spent every summer in Turkey, her mother's native land. With her Western upbringing and education, she knows she is different, but she does her best to learn the language and fit in with the friends she sees each year. Now Ada is 19 and in college, and she has a boyfriend back home. Summers in Turkey may not be possible once she graduates. Ada wants to know what her life would be like if she fully embraced her Turkish identity. She becomes obsessed with an older man named Levent, who dated her mother years ago. As she pursues him, he becomes an idol, someone who can show her what Turkey is really about. At the same time, he's an echo of the life her mother could have had as well. Atrek's debut is immersive and sensual; readers will feel as if they're truly on the gorgeous beaches with Ada. Ada's decisions, while ill-advised, are representative of her age and a woman wobbling toward adulthood. Those who enjoyed Angie Kim's Happiness Falls (2023) should pick up this book, another story about a new adult navigating between two cultures.

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December 15, 2023
A young woman spending the summer in Turkey becomes entangled with a man from her mother's past. "Turkey is, without a doubt, the most beautiful country in the world," says 19-year-old Ada. She would know: She's spent every summer there since she was a young child, returning with her Turkish mother, Meltem, to visit her grandmother in a sleepy seaside town, and leaving behind Ada's father, a successful Silicon Valley tech worker. Though these holidays aren't exactly idyllic--there's always tension between Ada's controlling grandmother and "stoic," depression-prone Meltem--this summer is particularly fraught. Ada's father has disclosed an affair, and Meltem is using the time away to decide the marriage's future. When Levent, an ex-flame of Meltem's, pops up in town, Ada thinks it could be the perfect chance to matchmake; she's rooting for her melancholy mother to embrace the life Ada suspects she's always wished for in Turkey. "It suddenly becomes very important to me that she fall in love with this man, that she reclaim the precision of her vocabulary," declares Ada. To Ada's surprise, though, she's the one who develops feelings for Levent, and her attempts to reach into her mother's past to alter her future may end up altering Ada's own irrevocably. In this, her debut, Atrek writes keenly of the liminality of the first-generation American--though Ada is confident and headstrong, her American life with her American boyfriend never seems to fit her, but neither does Turkey, where the language never rolls off her tongue perfectly and cultural touchstones sometimes bewilder her. Despite the collisions of all the characters' longings, this is a book full of pleasures: Turkish food, the sparkling Aegean, the laze of late summer, and, ultimately, of the difficult mysteries of mothers and daughters. An elegant portrayal of the overlap between mothers and motherlands.

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