Pull Me Under - by Kelly Luce (Paperback)

About the Book

Luce tells the story of Rio Silvestri, who, when she was twelve years old, fatally stabbed a school bully. Rio, born Chizuru Akitani, is the Japanese American daughter of the revered violinist Hiro Akitani a Living National Treasure in Japan and a man Rio hasn t spoken to since she left her home country for the United States (and a new identity) after her violent crime ther s death, along with a mysterious package that arrives on her doorstep in Boulder, Colorado, spurs her to return to Japan for the first time in twenty years.

Book Synopsis

Elle's 33 Best Books of the Year

A Searing Debut Novel from One of the Most Imaginative Minds in Fiction

Kelly Luce's Pull Me Under "is a suspense novel with a female protagonist that gets more right about women than so many others I've read in the past few years" (NPR).

Luce tells the story of Rio Silvestri, who, when she was twelve years old, fatally stabbed a school bully. Rio, born Chizuru Akitani, is the Japanese American daughter of the revered violinist Hiro Akitani--a Living National Treasure in Japan and a man Rio hasn't spoken to since she left her home country for the United States (and a new identity) after her violent crime. Her father's death, along with a mysterious package that arrives on her doorstep in Boulder, Colorado, spurs her to return to Japan for the first time in twenty years. There she is forced to confront her past in ways she never imagined, pushing herself, her relationships with her husband and daughter, and her own sense of who she is to the brink.

Review Quotes

"The writing of Kelly Luce is beautifully stark and simple, and at the same time playful, earthy, and violent. She's unique, a natural born writer, and Pull Me Under is a strange and very appealing novel, a journey to Japan and the primal scene of the main character's self--which, like a volcano, may have already blown its top." --Rachel Kushner

"Kelly Luce's unforgettable debut is an elegant mystery, a tender story of family and forgiveness, an unsettling depiction of the darkness we each carry inside, and a hymn to Japan. Noodle shops, summer festivals, ancient temples, and the lush landscape of rural Shikoku burst to life in these pages. From its first sentence, Pull Me Under grabs the reader and doesn't let go." --Sarah Bird, author of Above the East China Sea

"As Rio moves deeper into the painful secrets of the past, secrets that nearly destroyed her in childhood and are threatening to undo her once again, I could not stop turning the pages of Kelly Luce's hypnotic debut. Pull Me Under is a fierce and suspenseful exploration of the profoundly mysterious nature of identity, written with precise and spectacular beauty. Kelly Luce is one of our most thrilling new talents." --Laura van den Berg

"Kelly Luce's debut novel is an urgent and wise story about the many disparate identities a life can hold, but it is also an astonishing example of all that a novel can encompass. By turns, Pull Me Under is a finely crafted mystery, a portrait of a fractured family, an evocative travelogue, an aching coming-of-age tale, and an insightful contemplation of our inescapable histories in an increasingly globalized and digitized culture. In this novel, Luce offers many poignant, page-turning pleasures, but her greatest gift to the reader is her revelation of how a single life, a single mind, a single, artful book can contain multitudes." --Stefan Merrill Block

"This is a suspense novel with a female protagonist that gets more right about women than so many others I've read in the past few years." --NPR

"Revelatory" --Elle

"[Pull Me Under] will bewitch you." --O Magazine

"Beautifully written and utterly hypnotic, Pull Me Under is one you can't miss." Melissa Ragsdale, Bustle

"Propulsive and fresh . . . Luce knows how to end her story, and does so satisfyingly." Trine Tsouderos, The Chicago Tribune

"Kelly Luce has written a phenomenal novel in Pull Me Under, one that captivates and disquiets in its search for answers about the parts of ourselves that are unknowable . . . Luce maneuvers the reader through this story seamlessly, and, seeing as it's Halloween season and all, I'll say, too: she is a virtuosic jack-o-lantern carver, slicing and hewing away at her characters until their pulpy interiors are exposed. And from inside that space, she shines a light." --Vincent Scarpa, Electric Literature

"Pull Me Under, which follows Luce's award-winning short-story collection, is psychologically complex; it inspires horror, sympathy and even, at times, humor. Amid all the gray, however, one thing is certain: Luce is worth watching." --Suzanne Kamata, The Japan Times

"Luce's prose is sharp and powerful, rising to heights when conjuring a sense of nostalgia and homecoming for places that readers have likely never been. The Japan of Pull Me Under does not read as a caricature of the country, but rather a genuine experience that at times is both atmospheric and nearly tangible . . . Pull Me Under does so much so well." --BookPeople

"Kelly Luce's stories render memorably and with deadpan understatement their protagonists' obsessive combinations of longing and grief and bafflement in the face of their loved ones' emotional requirements, even as their worlds slip seamlessly into the uncanny. These stories unsettle as much as they entertain." --Jim Shepard

"Kelly Luce writes stories whose charm is a lasting effect. Her work is witty, unpredictable, and freshly written. There's a genuine imagination at work here that is a delight to spend time with." --Stuart Dybek

"In Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, Kelly Luce manages the impossible: each story delicate and enormous, intricate, glitteringly beautiful, never less than strange, never less than profound, ten spiderwebs astonishingly spun. Readers: here is your new favorite short story writer." --Elizabeth McCracken

"Luce deftly evokes Japan without exoticizing it . . . The final act is the novel's strongest and most confident, weaving the book's threads together and leaving a lasting reverberation." --Publishers Weekly

"Luce's debut novel is psychologically seductive, and the prose draws the reader into its loneliness. Pull Me Under shines brightest as an inquest into whether a split psyche can ever be made whole once the past becomes its own foreign country-and the tyranny of being taught that a dark past is not to be trespassed upon." -Amy Jo Burns, Ploughshares ("The Most Necessary Books for the End of 2016")

"Luce follows her hit story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, with a debut novel about secret lives and selfhood . . . Understated yet emotionally gripping, Luce's novel is an intimate portrayal of one woman's search for identity."
--Jonathan Fullmer, Booklist

"I was sucked into the prose and character in Luce's latest accomplishment from the very start. Rio Silvestri and Chizuru Akitani bring both the familiar and the terrifying parts of our psyche to the surface and then pull you right back down into the depths of this stunning debut novel." -Nick Buzanski, Book Culture

About the Author

KELLY LUCE is the author of the short-story collection Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, which won Foreword Reviews's 2013 Editor's Choice Prize for Fiction. A native of Illinois, she holds a degree in cognitive science from Northwestern University and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a contributing editor for Electric Literature. She lives in California's Santa Cruz Mountains.