A review by serendipitysbooks
Brass by Xhenet Aliu

4.0

Brass tells the story of two working class women from Waterbury, Connecticut. Waterbury was once prosperous town but is now down-on-its-luck following the closure of its many brass mills. Elsie is a waitress who begins a relationship with Bashkim, an Albanian immigrant with big dreams who’s working as a line cook. Elsie unexpectedly falls pregnant and their relationship is further complicated by the fact the Bashkim has a wife back in Albania. Seventeen years later their daughter Luljeta receives a rejection letter from her first choice college, her first ever school suspension and decides to find out more about her father, since her mother doesn’t talk about him. I liked the fact this was grit-lit, a genre I was previously unfamiliar with. I also liked the fact that this focused on the experience of immigrants from Albania, rather than the more usual areas of Africa, Asia or Central America. Reading the two interspersed coming of age narratives was fascinating, observing the similarities and differences between mother and daughter, not to mention the complicated relationship between the two of them.