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What We Give, What We Take

A Novel

By: Randi Triant

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Paperback | 12 April 2022

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In 1967, Fay Stonewell, a water tank escape artist in Florida, leaves for Vietnam to join the Amazing Humans—a jerry-rigged carnival there to entertain the troops—abandoning her disabled teenage son, Dickie, to the care of an abusive boyfriend.

Months after Fay’s departure, Dickie’s troubled home life ends in a surprising act of violence that forces him to run away. He soon lands in Manhattan, where he’s taken in by eccentric artist Laurence Jones. Fay, meanwhile, is also facing dangerous threats. From the night her plane jolts onto a darkened Saigon runway, she is forced to confront every bad decision she’s ever made as she struggles to return to her son. But the Humans owner is hell-bent on keeping her in Vietnam, performing only for war-injured children at a hospital, daily reminders of the son she’s left behind.

Decades later, Dickie is forty, living in a Massachusetts coastal town with a man who’s dying of AIDS, and doing everything he can to escape his past. But although Spin may be giving Dickie what he’s always wanted—a home without wheels—it seems that the farther Dickie runs, the tighter the past clings to him.

Ultimately, What We Give, What We Take is a deeply moving story of second chances and rising above family circumstances, however dysfunctional they may be.

Industry Reviews

"Those who expect a feel-good novel to come from all this will be disappointed. But they will be captured by very good writing and wonderful portraits of Fay and Dickie. . . . A very fine novel about a mother's love and a son's survival."

--Kirkus Reviews

"At once tender, cruel, sensitive, and raw, What We Give, What We Take is a searing novel in which wounded people make hard decisions in order to survive."

--Foreword Reviews

"What We Give, What We Take is the indelible portrait of a mother and son eking out lives on the periphery, first together, then apart. With a tenderness for life's misfits that recalls Carson McCullers, Randi Triant, in this remarkable novel, hauntingly evokes Fay's and Dickie's complexities, and those of the men and women who exploit, brutalize, nurture, and adore them."
--Claire Messud, author of the national bestselling novels, The Woman Upstairs and The Emperor's Children

"A haunting novel about people driven by longings beyond the boundaries of everyday life. Randi Triant tells a story that shimmers with surprises and insights about a world that's tilted towards unconventional answers to universal questions about love and desire. Her characters' problems are revealed with pain and humor that deliver transformations we cannot reject but that we feel are our very own. Rapid and unblinking, it's unforgettable."
--Maria Flook, author of New York Times bestseller Invisible Eden

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