A dazzling mother-daughter story Jenny Jackson, author of Pineapple Street'Funny, acerbic, and wonderfully playful: a novel to sink into' NAOMI WOOD, author of Mrs. Hemingway'Destined to become an instant classic. Richly drawn characters in an immigrant journey as old as America herself' ADRIANA TRIGIANI, author of The View From Lake ComoLos Angeles, 2001. Sonia is raising her daughter, Mila, alone in the sunny but somnolent suburbs of LA. Her days are a blur of not-quite-illegal business activities, avoiding other moms, and baking birthday cakes laced with rum: minor mistakes that nevertheless remind her she doesn t belong.Mila, meanwhile, is juggling violin and swimming lessons and navigating the treacherous social politics of school all the while trying to get her mother to share something, anything, about her past.But there are just too many things that Mila doesn t know:

So, Mila concocts a scheme to get her mother, and the man Mila is kind of sure must be her father to reconnect. It involves corralling Sonia into chaperoning an orchestra of ten-year-olds (most of whom seem to be called Megan) on a road trip from LA to San Francisco, and it may just cause their carefully constructed lives to implode.Moving between Budapest before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Washington, DC in the tense years of the Cold War and the bright sunshine of early 2000s Los Angeles, Porcupines is an irresistible novel about mothers and daughters, belonging and reinvention, the things we carry with us, and those we tell ourselves we ve left behind.

A dazzling mother-daughter story Jenny Jackson, author of Pineapple Street'Funny, acerbic, and wonderfully playful: a novel to sink into' NAOMI WOOD, author of Mrs. Hemingway'Destined to become an instant classic. Richly drawn characters in an immigrant journey as old as America herself' ADRIANA TRIGIANI, author of The View From Lake ComoLos Angeles, 2001. Sonia is raising her daughter, Mila, alone in the sunny but somnolent suburbs of LA. Her days are a blur of not-quite-illegal business activities, avoiding other moms, and baking birthday cakes laced with rum: minor mistakes that nevertheless remind her she doesn t belong.Mila, meanwhile, is juggling violin and swimming lessons and navigating the treacherous social politics of school all the while trying to get her mother to share something, anything, about her past.But there are just too many things that Mila doesn t know:

So, Mila concocts a scheme to get her mother, and the man Mila is kind of sure must be her father to reconnect. It involves corralling Sonia into chaperoning an orchestra of ten-year-olds (most of whom seem to be called Megan) on a road trip from LA to San Francisco, and it may just cause their carefully constructed lives to implode.Moving between Budapest before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Washington, DC in the tense years of the Cold War and the bright sunshine of early 2000s Los Angeles, Porcupines is an irresistible novel about mothers and daughters, belonging and reinvention, the things we carry with us, and those we tell ourselves we ve left behind.