It Is Wood, It Is Stone

I can still hear your words, the vibrant joy in your voice, as we sat in the back of a taxi stopped in traffic, the windows rolled down but no breeze blowing in, except for the occasional wind from a motorcyclist weaving past.

Is it what you expected? You clutched my hand and shook it with excitement.

Maybe I should answer that once we ve left the airport road. Don t you think?

I can t believe we re here, you said, not to me, but to a child waving to us from an adjacent car window.

The traffic sprawled for hours, barely moving, like a snake that had swallowed a calf. You had told me before that São Paulo was not the tropical paradise on postcards; it wasn t the pictures of women on the beach with fruit baskets on their heads. High-rise buildings traced the horizon and favelas extended for miles on both sides of the highway. We passed a road that broke into the dense favela tessellation, revealing clothing lines strung from brick wall to metal roof, and a young girl pushing a shopping cart filled with cans and palm leaves.

A barefoot man standing on the partition walked in front of our stopped taxi and began to juggle oranges for money.

Look, you said and nudged my arm, but the cabdriver wasn t, so I didn t want to.

When the traffic moved again, just three car lengths, the man wouldn t step away, so the driver whistled and waved his arm out the window. Not angry, but persistent.

Linda give him some money, you said.

I only have U.S. dollars, I said, stirring the contents of my purse.

You took out your wallet.

They gave me fifties at the money exchange.

For a moment I saw you weigh whether you should part with a fifty-real note. Then the man moved to the side and the taxi lurched forward.

This trip felt like a series of fever dreams from the start. Just four months earlier, on a cold afternoon in September, you came home and told me you had

Gabriella Burnham is a dual citizen of the United States and Brazil. Now a New York resident, she lived in Sa o Paulo as a child and most of her family still lives there today. She holds an MFA in creative writing from The Writer s Foundry at St. Joseph s College and has been awarded fellowships to MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. She has worked as a reporter, a creative writing teacher, and in immigration law. It Is Wood, It Is Stone is her first novel.

It Is Wood, It Is Stone is a fever dream of a book; absolutely captivating and wonderfully destabilizing. I could not put it down. It is about uprootedness, class and color, and sex. It is about women on the verge of collapse, of escape, of self-knowledge failing and flailing and propping one another up. It is a book about the limits of propriety and the boundlessness of grace. Burnham is a writer of such remarkable insight, it s impossible to believe this is her debut. Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

An absorbing and remarkably assured debut, It Is Wood, It Is Stone marries taut, cinematic suspense with intimate, textured domestic realism. Hits a major refresh button on the genre of psychological thriller and gives us something immensely satisfying and new. Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox

Intimate, unsparing, and compassionate, It Is Wood, It Is Stone is unlike anything I ve read. It s a portrait of a woman adrift, but more than that, it s a reflection on race, class, and privilege, rendered in beautifully observed and textured prose that describes hazy internal weather with gimlet clarity. Gabriella Burnham writes with generosity and with sympathy for human imperfection and captures so well the pain, envy, and expectations in life that make up each of our pasts, and linger into our present. Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin

I would recommend this book based on the cover alone. Thankfully, the story inside is equally gorgeous, following three women in São Paulo: the anxious and listless Linda; her conflicted but steady maid, Marta; and Celia, an intoxicating artist with whom Linda leaves home. A lush depiction of privilege and power, sex and stability, It Is Wood, It Is Stone is an elegant arrival of a new talent. Elle

Burnham