In her poetic first novel, Matalone probes the meaning of home and family. Cybil, a war child who never knew her Japanese mother and French father, was adopted and brought to America, but her adoptive mother resents her beauty and foreignness. Cybil, in turn, becomes a loving single mom to her daughter, Chloe. Now Chloe lives in Virginia, near her estranged husband who has for several reasons made their once happy home his private island. He has bought her a fixer-upper she could not afford herself. Her room-by-room renovation plans her hopes for a second chance become metaphors for the deep work of home making. Beau, Chloe's best friend, has his own fraught family story and longs for a man from his youth. These vivid characters revisit their pasts and make plans to build a place where happiness can bloom. Chloe's renovation watchword is Rome, as in not built in a day. So it is with home-making. The work is never done. The layers of meaning Matalone evokes provide a rich trove for discussion.--Mary Ellen Prindiville Copyright 2020 Booklist

Rumpus columnist Matalone's heady, lyrical debut overlays an adopted woman's journey into motherhood with her daughter's story of making a home for herself as an adult. Born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and French father, Cybil is adopted by an American couple in Arizona in the 1950s and eventually has a daughter, Chloe, who, in the present, struggles to make a home out of a sprawling house she buys in Virginia while estranged from her husband, Pat, contrasting their old house with Le Corbusier's aphorism, "A house is a machine for living in" ("machines break, become defunct"). In spare chapters, Mantalone moves back and forth in time to trace the shapes of Cybil's and Chloe's identities through their relationships to domestic spaces. As Chloe wanders from dining room to kitchen to closet in her new house, she ruminates on the varied meanings of home, reflecting on her childhood and contemplating a future with her best friend, Beau, a gay man who glibly encourages her, "As the great sculpture of pirouetting steel, Richard Serra, said, space is material." In measured prose, Matalone draws out connections between past and present to illuminate the mother and daughter's shared sense of ambiguity toward motherhood. Matalone's cool reflections on art and architecture will appeal to fans of Chris Kraus. (Feb.)