Terrace Story

 Terrace Story (2023) by Hilary Leichter

Synopsis from book flap: Annie, Edward, and their young daughter, Rose, live in a cramped apartment. One night, without warning, they find a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet. It wasn't there before, and it seems to only appear when their friend Stephanie visits. A city dweller's dream come true! But every extra bit of space has a hidden cost, and the terrace sets off a seismic chain of events, forever changing the shape of their tiny home, and the shape of the world.

Terrace Story follows the characters who suffer these repercussions and reverberations: the little family of three, their future now deeply uncertain, and those who orbit their fragile universe. The distance and love between these characters expands limitlessly, across generations. How far can the mind travel when it's looking for something that is gone? Where do we put our loneliness, longing, and desire? What do we do with the emotions that seem to stretch beyond the body, beyond the boundaries of life and death?

Based on the National Magazine Award-winning story, Hilary Leichter's profound second novel asks how we nurture love when death looms over every moment. From one of our most innovative and daring writers, Terrace Story is an astounding meditation on loss, a reverie about extinction, and a map for where to go next.

This is described above as a second novel. It feels nothing like a novel to me. It reads like a series of loosely related short stories--related because people mentioned in the very first one appear in later stories (not all every time). We jump around in time and the book has a very disjointed feel even though the final story does bring us around full circle. I don't mind time travel stories and I don't mind stories with a message--as the blurb implies this has. But I do like to feel as though I understand the characters and what's going on. The conversations between Annie and Edward make zero sense to me about 80-90% of the time, so I didn't connect with them as much as I would have liked.

I was very intrigued by the concept in the first story...which is where the idea of the hidden terrace is explored. I think if the rest of the book had fleshed that out in a more concrete way I would have enjoyed it a lot more. ★★ and 1/2. 

First line (1st story): The old window gave a grand view of yellow tree, trunk to branch.

Last lines (last story): Then the ship tilted away. Toward what, she could not guess.