Plum

March 1, 2025
Anderegg's moving first novel opens with a girl and her brother futilely scooping rotting plums from the ground, afraid of their father's wrath if they do it wrong, whatever that might mean. In merely a few sentences, we know everything about this fragile family, in particular about the sister, who desperately wants to both hold it together and to escape its toxicity. Plum is told from that young girl's perspective in second person, as if coaching herself through adolescence. She relays very few straightforward anecdotes or big details, not even her name. Instead, through only brief flashes of her life--parents absent when they aren't berating her, going online, growing up too fast--we see her loneliness and fears uncomfortably close up. As she hardens herself against emotional abuse, we feel how she hates and mistrusts adults even as she becomes one. And how she longs for her protector brother, who left her behind, all while navigating her delicate evolution into a wife and parent. Even with such a spare plot, Anderegg has created a beautiful page-turner with an unforgettable perspective.

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Starred review from April 1, 2025
A girl outlasts a harrowing childhood and, though falteringly, enjoys control over her life. This debut novel is told entirely in the second person, a bold move that injects the story with a special sort of hypersensitivity. As the reader grows still and silent--listening for a car in the driveway, clattering in the kitchen, any sign of parents (and thus, trouble)--alongside the narrator, known only as J, Anderegg places them into the role of a child in an abusive, neglectful home, constantly self-policing, seeking meager moments of peace, and hoping to eventually have the chance to shape their own lives. She lays out J's good and bad days at home with her angry alcoholic father, her exhausted, spiteful mother, and her introverted older brother--her only ally and the recipient of all of their father's beatings--in the same unflinching prose. Amid the chaos, J generally chooses numbness and painstakingly calculated obedience, even if she does not understand why she must behave a given way. "What is a rule?," she asks, and how does she know whether it's just? Initially, it doesn't really matter to J. If she's not being yelled at, she's left alone to dream and plan for her far-off, glimmering future. She copies friends at school and people on TV; she gets a car, a credit card, a college degree. "You do not know this yet," her wiser, future self narrates, "but you are raising you." Tired of letting life happen to her, she molds herself into a woman through sheer will. Anderegg delicately considers the strange hollowness of having succeeded in getting out--of having the freedom and tools to find happiness, but nursing a shot nervous system and a crooked view of relationships. Yet, the book insists that nurture (or lack thereof) is not all there is. "This is your nature," Anderegg writes. "This is who you are and who cannot be destroyed or told to shut up." It is enlivening to witness J's steely resolve and to follow her relationship with her brother, which offers a glance into the shocking strength of a shared childhood. Anderegg's novel outlives its pages.

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