The story of a runaway mother’s ten days of freedom--and the pain, desire, longing, and wonder we find on the messy road to enlightenment--from Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegría Hudes. April is a young mother raising her daughter in an intergenerational house of unspoken secrets and loud arguments. Her only refuge is to hide away in a locked bathroom, her ears plugged into an ambient soundscape, and a mantra on her lips: and tough love. Just as April finds in her painful and absurd sojourn the key to freeing herself and her family from a cage of generational trauma, so Hudes turns April’s stumbling pursuit of herself into an unforgettable short epic of self-discovery.

Autorentext

Quiara Alegria Hudes

Klappentext

**The story of a runaway mother’s ten days of freedom—and the pain, desire, longing, and wonder we find on the messy road to enlightenment—from Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegría Hudes.

“The White Hot has the effect of pressing your hand to a barbed live wire. April’s is one of the most memorable voices I’ve encountered in recent fiction. . . . [A] brilliant depiction of a woman learning to transform her rage into something resembling transcendence.”—The New York Times Book Review
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, OPRAH DAILY, KIRKUS REVIEWS, BOOKPAGE **

April is a young mother raising her daughter in an intergenerational house of unspoken secrets and loud arguments. Her only refuge is to hide away in a locked bathroom, her ears plugged into an ambient soundscape, and a mantra on her lips: dead inside. That is, until one day, as she finds herself spiraling toward the volcanic rage she calls the white hot, a voice inside her tells her to just . . . walk away. She wanders to a bus station and asks for a ticket to the furthest destination; she tells the clerk to make it one-way. That ticket takes her from her Philly home to the threshold of a wilderness and the beginning of a nameless quest—an accidental journey that shakes her awake, almost kills her, and brings her to the brink of an impossible choice.

The White Hot takes the form of a letter from mother to daughter about a moment of abandonment that would stretch from ten days to ten years—an explanation, but not an apology. Hudes narrates April’s story—spiritual and sexy, fierce and funny—with delicate lyricism and tough love. Just as April finds in her painful and absurd sojourn the key to freeing herself and her family from a cage of generational trauma, so Hudes turns April’s stumbling pursuit of herself into an unforgettable short epic of self-discovery.

Leseprobe
Noelle received the envelope eight years after her mother’s disappearance. She got home from school and found it propped on the counter, oversize and leaning against the microwave door, clearly placed there by her dad or stepmother to catch her eye. She ran a finger over the uppercase letters: NOELLE SOTO. It wasn’t the handwriting that dinged memory’s bell so much as the pen’s feral indentations. No sender was named above the return address but Noelle recognized those grooves like a gut recognizes a fist. The same ones she’d glimpsed on emergency contact forms—“blue cards”—brought into school in Septembers, on grocery lists carried to the corner store. Why did her mom press so hard for the littlest of nothings? Grooves that attacked the paper, letters like jackhammers.

One corner was ripped and a binder clip peeked through. She folded the torn flap and saw a return address in Pittsburgh. Six hours away. Did that mean her mom had been close all this time, or far? “Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh . . .” the devil laughed in her ear. “Pitts-burgh . . .”

On the back, a note: To my daughter. An explanation. Do not open until your eighteenth birthday.

And so, with rumbling heart and saliva pasting tongue to teeth (fury’s alchemy gave her a mouthful of metal), Noelle plunged a finger into the manila corner and ripped open the fabric of her world. Seven weeks left till graduation, till the long-awaited diploma, but no: adulthood began now, with these loosely stacked pages and whatever “explanation” they might offer, or claim to offer, or fail to offer. Noelle devoured her mother’s words in three hours, standing by the microwave, before meeting her dad, stepmother, and brothers at the Italian restaurant where her birthday tiramisu would arrive with a glittering lit sparkler plunged into its core.

Dear Noelle, (I am tempted to say dear Noe or dear Nolita),

I am not going to send this. It’s an exercise, it should probably say Dear April at the top because it’s for me. I’ve written it a thousand times already, in countless ways—defenses, apologies—the only difference now is I’ve gotten real paper involved.

Your milestone barrels at me. Wishes push up. They don’t care that I’ve forfeited the right to wish them.

That we splurge on Crayolas and a notepad and head to East River Drive.

That we get lemonades and do your homework on the bench outside Target.

That I give you double Dutch braids, the diagonal ones that take at least four episodes of America’s Got Talent.

That a midnight thunderstorm rouses you, we go downstairs, kneel on the sofa like cats, and watch the sky streak, scared together. You scared of the volume, me of your fear.

I know, I know. Unfair desires. Outdated, too. I ping myself each time.

Deeper down, though, a realer wish rumbles, directed at tangible present-tense you, a wish for Noelle Soto on the cusp of womanhood.

That you lick the winds of freedom.

On this, I have some experience. The knowledge cost me everything and I’ll be damned if it goes to waste. So, imagine this: We meet up at a café. Maybe it’s the Dominican bakery on my corner, where I crammed for my GED and spent a year wrestling Beloved. First, I marvel at your changed appearance, eight years has transformed you. Oh, mija. (May I? What right do I have?) We sit. Place to ourselves. There’s just one table by the window, and a lace curtain blurs the sidewalk beyond. A little privacy, but it still requires of us some public civility. Bachata twanging (Romeo Santos?) so I gotta lean in to tell you why I left . . . the when and how of it . . . Maybe at an angle so close I can’t even see your face as I speak, cuz certainly I’d have a change of heart . . .

•

That awful day began with your classroom art show. Do you remember? Our Family Homes. In a roomful of parents and fourth-graders—some sweeter than you, others more assured—you were a vexing blend of devious and brilliant. During the presentation, you bombed on vocal projection and eye contact, but no one cared because what you captured in pencil, crayon, and Oprah magazine cutout was uncanny for a ten-year-old. It wasn’t the first time your smarts were borderline embarrassing.

“We got two bedrooms, two beds, four people,” you said, pointing out various corners of your drawing. “Me and Mom sleep head to foot here, Abuela Omara and Mamá Suset sleep head to foot here. This is the hallway, with a rhinestone baby Jesus. We redid the bathroom to be a Zen sanctuary with a plastic bamboo on the toilet,” you said. Not only had you drawn the Evening Buddha aromatherapy candle, but also its half-ripped price tag from Ross Dress for Less. “There’s a Do Not Disturb sign on the bathroom door. And a lock, too.” You spoke the word lock as if it were salvation. “My mom be loving that lock. That’s her favorite part of the whole house.”

I began to feel caustic and unsound.

The…