Defenestrate

A wildly inventive, exhilarating debut narrated by a young woman meditating on her Czech ancestors' falling curse," her twin brother's fall from a window, and the malleable, breakable bonds keeping her family from falling apart. Marta and her twin brother Nick have always been haunted and fascinated by an ancestral legend that holds that members of their family are doomed to various types of falls. And when their own family falls apart in the wake of a revelation and a resulting devastating fight with their Catholic mother, the twins move to Prague, the city in which their "falling curse" began. There Marta and Nick try to forge a new life for themselves. But their ties to the past and each other prove difficult to disentangle, and when they ultimatelyreturn to their midwestern home and Nick falls from a window himself, they are forced to confront the truths they've hidden from each other and themselves. Through this compelling, exuberant exploration of all the ways there are to fall-from defenestration in nineteenth century Prague to the pratfalls of their childhood idol Buster Keaton, from falling in love to falling midflight from an airplane-Defenestrate is a stunning, unsettling, and deeply original debut. Grappling with family myths, repression, and mental illness, Renee Branum shows us how stories reveal and conceal life's secrets and how they affect one particular family as they try to protect one another from their true history"--