What We Give, What We Take: A Novel

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Parade Magazine's 20 New LGBTQ+ Books We're Loving This Year

Women.com's10 LGBTQ Must-Reads for Pride Month

She Knows.com's10 Books Featuring Mother-Child Relationships & All Their BeautifulComplexity

In 1967, Fay Stonewell, a water tank escape artist in Florida, leaves for Vietnam to join the Amazing Humansa jerry-rigged carnival there to entertain the troopsabandoning her disabled teenage son, Dickie, to the care of an abusive boyfriend.

Months after Fays departure, Dickies troubled home life ends in a surprising act of violence that forces him to run away. He soon lands in Manhattan, where hes taken in by eccentric artist Laurence Jones. Fay, meanwhile, is also facing dangerous threats. From the night her plane jolts onto a darkened Saigon runway, she is forced to confront every bad decision shes ever made as she struggles to return to her son. But the Humans owner is hell-bent on keeping her in Vietnam, performing only for war-injured children at a hospital, daily reminders of the son shes left behind.

Decades later, Dickie is forty, living in a Massachusetts coastal town with a man whos dying of AIDS, and doing everything he can to escape his past. But although Spin may be giving Dickie what hes always wanteda home without wheelsit seems that the farther Dickie runs, the tighter the past clings to him.

Ultimately, What We Give, What We Take is a deeply moving story of second chances and rising above family circumstances, however dysfunctional they may be.

Reviews

Those who expect a feel-good novel to come from all this will be disappointed. But they will be captured by very good writing and wonderful portraits of Fay and Dickie. . .. A very fine novel about a mothers love and a sons survival.
Kirkus Reviews

At once tender, cruel, sensitive, and raw, What We Give, What We Takeis a searing novel in which wounded people make hard decisions in order to survive.
Foreword Reviews

What We Give, What We Take is the indelible portrait of a mother and son eking out lives on the periphery, first together, then apart. With a tenderness for life's misfits that recalls Carson McCullers, Randi Triant, in this remarkable novel, hauntingly evokes Fay's and Dickie's complexities, and those of the men and women who exploit, brutalize, nurture, and adore them.
Claire Messud, author of the national bestselling novels, The Woman Upstairs and The Emperor's Children

A haunting novel about people driven by longings beyond the boundaries of everyday life. Randi Triant tells a story that shimmers with surprises and insights about a world thats tilted towards unconventional answers to universal questions about love and desire. Her characters problems are revealed with pain and humor that deliver transformations we cannot reject but that we feel are our very own. Rapid and unblinking, its unforgettable.
Maria Flook, author of New York Times bestseller Invisible Eden

Author Bio

Randi Triant is the author of the novels The Treehouse, selected as an AfterEllen.com ultimate summer read, and A New Life. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in literary journals and magazines, including two anthologies of writing about HIV/AIDS, Art & Understanding: Literature from the First Twenty Years of A & U and Fingernails Across the Blackboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora. She lives inProvincetown, Massachusetts.