You Are One of Them

Reviews

“The great accomplishment in You Are One of Them is how effortlessly the vast and global mixes with—and informs—the deeply felt story of a lost friendship. Elliott Holt is graceful, sharp, and supersmart, and her novel is a bildungsroman for the atomic age.”

“You Are One of Them journeys through the US and Russia, perfectly capturing that frightening time in the 1980s when every child went to bed dreaming of mushroom clouds. Like the cold war, this remarkable novel revolves around hidden truths and unreliable friendships. Elliott Holt skillfully draws out her characters’ secrets, exploring the different ways we open and close our hearts and delivering a well-wrought tale of international and emotional intrigue.”

“Elliott Holt has done something utterly amazing. Through the experiences of Sarah Zuckerman, the fantastic and complicated narrator of You Are One of Them, Holt shows us a genuine and heartfelt coming of age story that so convincingly reveals the deceptions and half truths of growing up. I have rarely seen such a thought-provoking and engrossing portrayal of how our experiences shape us and, consequently, those we most love. This is an eloquent, startling novel, and Elliott Holt is a fearless writer.”

“Holt’s descriptions of Moscow in the mid-1990s are fascinating, slyly funny, and full of melancholy details…You Are One of Them is a hugely absorbing first novel from a writer with a fluid, vivid style and a rare knack for balancing the pleasure of entertainment with the deeper gratification of insight. More, please.”

“Holt evokes post–Cold War Moscow as capably as she renders Washington, summoning piquant details—the rusting infrastructure swathed in grime and cigarette smoke; the streets thronged with track-suited men, scolding old ladies, supermodels, prostitutes, expats—and the vigorous mood of a culture striving for reinvention…Holt has found inventive ways to use language that suggests the porousness of identity, the correspondence between self and other, neighbor and foreigner, you and them. Her ingenuity brings distinction to this confident, crafty first novel.”

“Telling details of Soviet oppression and Russia’s budding advertising industry paint a vivid portrait of a country testing the waters of democracy. Holt, who won a Pushcart Prize for her short fiction, writes with a pleasing, wry intelligence in this promising debut.”

“Holt, once a copywriter and now an award-winning fiction author, evokes with perfect clarity the sparkling tones of friendship and the hollow clangs of betrayal. Holt’s Cold War plot and setting make a fertile medium for growing the suspicion that loyalty is but love’s plaything. This debut novel delivers a satisfying and mature narrative for all readers and may have a special resonance for young adults.”

“Holt perfectly melds the personal and the political in this spot-on portrait of a girlhood friendship set against a Cold War backdrop…Holt ably captures both the paranoia of the Cold War and the shabby yet genteel aura of an exhausted Moscow just after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. But it is her razor-sharp insights into the turbulent dynamics of female friendship that give this novel its heft.”

“Elliott Holt is not just a promising writer but a great writer. She’s young, and she’s a master. I was going to write that You Are One of Them could’ve been written by an Alice Munro or a Susan Minot, but that would be wrong. Because this book could only have been written by Elliott Holt, whose powerful new voice is her own.”

“Elliott Holt’s debut novel You Are One of Them reads with the heartbreaking ring of truth to it as she deftly taps a well of feeling that is at once primal, archetypical, and deeply personal. Through the character of Sarah, Holt explores the indelible stain of grief, a child’s desire for détente, and the inescapable awareness of the life that could have been but wasn’t. Holt’s ability to unwind the dangerous power of secrets and to blend fact and fiction, past and present, make for an evocative journey that circles around to illustrate how far we sometimes have to travel in order to find the self that was there all along.”

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