A restless young woman struggles to find agency in Brazilian American author Gabriella Burnham's novel It Is Wood, It Is Stone. Linda's husband, Dennis, announces that he's been awarded a temporary professorship in São Paulo, Brazil, on the day she meant to tell him she was leaving him. She doesn't share her intention and decides to go, leading to a crisis she explains through a brutally honest monologue to Dennis. Her plan to leave "was less a solution and more like a heartbeat trying to break free from its rib cage," she tells him.
But São Paulo, instead of freeing her, creates even more claustrophobia. Unable to be truly independent because of language barriers and her own insecurities, Linda feels trapped in her apartment with Marta, their day maid. Marta is an enigma to Linda, who, for a time, stops leaving the apartment "for fear that Marta might grow roots in our bedroom and reorganize the air so that I could no longer breathe."
Linda sees Dennis as conventional and predictable, yet she wishes for his pragmatism, saying, "My goal was to find a wormhole, a channel to escape the odds, so that I too could achieve those things." Linda's escape comes through Celia, a captivating Brazilian woman. Their brief affair simultaneously gives Linda freedom and creates a tipping point in her marriage. She assures Dennis, "I wasn't looking to turn away from you; I wasn't looking to replace you; I was searching for another version of myself."
This debut novel is striking in its confident, close study of a complex woman in a fragile marriage. --Cindy Pauldine, bookseller, the river's end bookstore, Oswego, N.Y.