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 never shares 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, who seems to have "a quiet, solitary bubble inside her mind." 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: "You approached life as a series of strategic decisions.... I saw life as the unavoidable consequence of a system much larger than me." 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. "I've thought many times about how I should explain this part of my story to you," she tells Dennis. "I was ready to grow. And I now know, this type of growth can only be learned through an emotional apprenticeship from another woman who has learned the same." Linda's brief affair with Celia simultaneously gives her freedom and creates a tipping point in their 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."
Linda does return to their apartment, where Marta's solid presence creates a path to reconstitute the marriage. "We were beginning to dissolve," Linda reminds Dennis. "We had turned stone to liquid; we were shaping our broken branch into a boat that, eventually, would float us down the river, toward forgiveness." 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.
Shelf Talker: A discontented young woman moves to Brazil with her husband, exposing her insecurities and leading to a crisis that tests her marriage.