REPEAT AFTER ME

Rachel DeWoskin is that rarest of things; a real writer. She is musical and smart, serious and fun, modern and timeless. Repeat After Me is a masterwork -- a hilarious, sad, page-turning masterwork.

Characters I care about and cannot predict; narrative that is thrilling and feels real; comedy that is generated by reality, so that it deepens emotion; nimble, engaging prose— Repeat After Me has everything I want in a novel. Rachel DeWoskin’s clear-eyed, cunning imagination has proceeded from her brilliant nonfiction Foreign Babes in Beijing to create a memorable work of art—again including DeWoskin’s unique sense of the exchanges and collisions between cultures.

I was much less discriminating than Aysha, the large hearted narrator of Rachel Dewoskin's Repeat After Me. I fell in love not only with Da Ge, her young Chinese student, but with all the characters, American and Chinese, in this scintillating, far-ranging, wonderfully intelligent novel. I am full of admiration for how deeply DeWoskin knows the streets of both Manhattan and Beijing, and how effortlessly she transports her reader between the two. Repeat After Me made my life feel larger in the best possible way.

Cultures don’t so much collide as coalesce in DeWoskin’s sparkling debut novel, which follows the relationship of two people with more in common than their backgrounds would suggest. Aysha Silvermintz is a marginally neurotic, sublimely needy young instructor of English to immigrants in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Her student Da Ge is an intriguingly taciturn, softly menacing Chinese national who came to the U.S. in the wake of the Tiananmen Square uprisings. What they lack in fluid communication skills they more than make up for in shared emotional fragility, born of family tragedies and personal failures. Aysha falls instantly and secretly in love with Da Ge, lomg before he bluntly asks her to marry him so he can become a U.S. citizen. Aysha becomes pregnant, but before she can tell him, Da Ge commits suicide just days before his citizenship is finalized. Determined to understand what plagued this tortured, enigmatic man, Aysha moves to China where she’ll raise the daughter he never knew. Infusing her multicultural narrative with vibrant observations that glitter with laser-intense acuity, DeWoskin demonstrates a smart, sophisticated literary agility.

In her mesmerizing first novel, Rachel Dewoskin tells a poignant story of love, deception and forgiveness that draws you in with characters as tough and passionate as the cities they inhabit, New York and Beijing. Written with rare sensitivity and splendid wit, Repeat After Me ponders the complexity of relationships within and across cultures in ways both moving and revealing.

This complex story of friendship, family, honor, and cultural differences is rich and deep. DeWoskin (Foreign Babes in Beijing) has firsthand knowledge of China, its language, and its traditions, as well as life in New York City, and her characters live and breathe. Recommended for all fiction collections.