Vera or Faith

 By: Gary Shteyngart  

Location: FIC SHT

Genre: Realistic Life

A poignant, sharp-eyed, and bitterly funny tale of a family struggling to stay together in a country rapidly coming apart, told through the eyes of their wondrous ten-year-old daughter, by the bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story and Our Country Friends

The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who's barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage provide him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half-Jewish, half-Korean, and wholly original.

Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world.

Both biting and deeply moving, Vera, or Faith is a boldly imagined story of family and country told through the clear and tender eyes of a child. With a nod to What Maisie Knew, Henry James's classic story of parents, children, and the dark ironies of a rapidly transforming society, Vera, or Faith demonstrates why Shteyngart is, in the words of The New York Times, "one of his generation's most exhilarating writers."

REVIEW from  Angela at Goodreads

I enjoy stories told from the perspective of children who are often precocious. Ten year old Vera stole my heart from the start. It was heartbreaking to feel her anxiety believing she’s been abandoned by her birth mother, anxious that her parents would get a divorce and her second mom would abandon her. I couldn’t quite figure out her parents, disliked them , especially her father. Vera does figure them out eventually as she struggles to come to grips with her relationships and desperately tries to find her birth mom. It was heartbreaking to feel the stress of this little girl, as she struggles to make a friend and is made fun of at school. Heartbreaking as she shakes and shakes her hands until she can think of something else as she suffers through recess. Vera’s “Things I Still Need to Know Diary” will make you laugh and cry at the same time as she records vocabulary words and phrases she hears from the adults around her as she tries, but doesn’t always succeed in putting them in the right context .

There is a bit of AI and a self driving car . There’s a commentary on democracy, scary and feeling much too relevant like it could have been out of today’s news. There is an upcoming constitutional amendment vote in the states to “decide whether to give “an enhanced vote” counting for five thirds of a regular vote to so-called “exceptional Americans, “ those who landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War, but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains.” Relevant to Vera as she is Korean American and in a school debate she has to take the side for the amendment. Bottom line is that in spite of the quirks and turns in the story line, Vera is a force of nature, and really just a kid who wants to be loved and I couldn’t help but love her .