Some Things That Stay - by Sarah Willis (Paperback)

About the Book

This debut novel introduces 15-year-old Tamara Anderson, who's grown up on the move, crossing the country during the 1950s. Now she wants to stay in Mayville, New York. There's not much to stick around for, but this time she's putting her foot down and planting it.

Book Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book, Winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, A Book-of-the-Month Club and Quality Paperback Book Club Selection, and Winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature

Tamara Anderson was in third grade when she found out most people stay in the same house for more than a year. Until then she thought everyone picked up and moved on a regular basis, crossing the country, leaving behind people and bedrooms and belongings. Now she's turning fifteen, and she wants to stay in Mayville, New York. At first glance, there isn't much to stick around for. In the tarpaper house across the road there are the Murphys, the Baptist family who upset Tamara's atheist parents by inviting her to church. In the pasture there's Edith the cow. And up in the attic there's the ghost of the boy who used to live here, or at least that's what Tamara suspects. But this time Tamara is putting her foot down, and planting it...

Taking us into the heart and mind of an unforgettable young girl, and a unique corner of a rural 1950s America, Sarah Willis presents a "heartfelt first novel [in which] the characters are so vivid and rounded they produce a reflected happiness in the reader." (The Miami Herald)

Review Quotes

"What makes [Some Things That Stay] such a prize is precisely the endearing form of dysfunction the family practices, and the voice that reports it...Willis has an unfailing ear for the unsentimental and the loopy."--Elinor Lipman, The Boston Sunday Globe

"Willis has a fine sense of place. She effectively conjures Tamara's small world, the half-built bomb shelter by the garden, the Murphys' house with the rusting cars whose grilles glisten 'like the teeth of rabid dogs, ' and she taps, with real power, into that most basic human need: a place to call home." --Chicago Tribune

"Memorable."--The New York Times Book Review

"Funny." -- Entertainment Weekly

"A bit like a northern Kaye Gibbons, Willis tells a coming-of-age story that is tender and moving. A first novel worth reading." -- Library Journal "Intelligent and moving... Tamara's uncommonly lucid, honest, and expansive view marks this as a luminous, impressive debut."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A feisty narrator...Tamara is an engaging character." --The New York Times Book Review

"Willis's writing is clear and fresh, capturing the emotional edge of childhood and the search for home in one's heart." --Library Journal

"Heartfelt...Whenever it would appear that no more successful variations on the American coming-of-age novel remain, an engaging new book arrives. Willis's is the most recent." --The Miami Herald

"Set in 1954, this tangy debut is [a] fully imagined coming-of-age story...Even though Willis's light, funny take turns deeper and more nuanced when Liz contracts tuberculosis and is quarantined in a sanitorium--effectively ending Tamara's adolescence--the novel never loses its edge."--Entertainment Weekly

About the Author

Sarah Willis, a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature, is also the author of Some Things That Stay, The Rehearsal, and A Good Distance. She lives in Ohio.