The Floating World

August 14, 2017
Babst’s tightly written debut focuses on the fractured Boisdoré clan, whose familial tensions are brought to a head in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Six weeks after the storm, Joe, an absent-minded furniture maker separated from his wife, Tess, a psychologist and the breadwinner, moves in with his father, Vincent, who has dementia. Tess and Joe split because she is furious with him for failing to rescue their daughter, stubborn 28-year-old Cora, from New Orleans after she refused to evacuate. Their other child, Del, returns home after having suddenly lost her job in New York to find Cora in a near-catatonic state. Cora, who has a history of mental illness, went through an experience during the storm that left her traumatized. After Del discovers a body in a house where Cora weathered part of Katrina, Del and Cora become increasingly convinced that Cora may be responsible. As the sisters try to figure out who committed the crime, Babst skillfully makes the reader feel Del’s desperate fears about Cora and the sisters’ frustrations with their elders. She’s also adept at pitting Tess’s pushy nature against Joe’s more passive tendencies. Despite a discordant ending, this is a riveting novel about the inescapable pull of family.

Starred review from August 15, 2017
A New Orleans family is shattered and scattered by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath."Grief was infinite, though, wasn't it," thinks one of the characters midway through this powerful, important novel, "something like love that, divided, did not diminish." Babst's debut tracks the experiences of five family members from the pre-Katrina evacuation of the city through late November 2005, 93 days after landfall. Dr. Tess Eshleman is a psychiatrist, an Uptown blue blood married to Joe Boisdore, a Creole sculptor descended from freed slaves whose work has made it as far as the Guggenheim; the couple raised their two mixed-race daughters in a historic house on the Esplanade. By the time the hurricane drops a magnolia tree through the roof of that home, Tess and Joe have evacuated to Houston, taking with them Joe's father, who suffers from advanced Lewy body dementia and was in an institution until it shut down for the storm. Their daughter Cora, who struggles with mental illness and depression, refused to leave with the family, then cannot be found when they return. By the time their other daughter, Del, arrives from New York City in October, the pressures of the storm have driven Tess and Joe to separate--and though Cora has been found, drinking tea with an elderly friend of the family in the ruins of her garden, she is catatonic. Much of the plot is devoted to unpacking exactly what happened to her during the storm and the flood. This novel is New Orleans to the bone, an authentic, detailed picture of the physical and emotional geography of the city, before, during, and after the tragedy, its social strata, its racial complications, the zillion cultural details that define its character: the parrots in the palm trees, the pork in the green beans, the vein in the shrimp, "the goddamned tacky way he flew his Rex flag out of season." Deeply felt and beautifully written; a major addition to the literature of Katrina.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2017
In New Orleans, one month after Hurricane Katrina, the extended Boisdore clan is painfully adrift. Joe and Tess can hardly welcome their daughter Del when she returns from New York, so preoccupied are they with their older daughter Cora, who is physically present but unreachable; Joe's dad, whose dementia is rapidly progressing; and their own, crumbling marriage. When Joe and Tess obeyed the prestorm mandatory-evacuation order, Cora stayed behind. She had lived through storms; how bad could it be? Unfathomable, in fact. In the aftermath, while her family worried that they'd lost her, Cora helped rescue others, her friend's two young nephews in particular. But now Cora is mysteriously stricken with a sense of responsibility for the boys' mother's death. Babst closely follows each Boisdore, reconstructing the histories of their racially blended family, their decimated city, and what went on while Cora was the only member of the family there. Waving through time in chapters labeled with the number of days before or after Katrina's landfall, Babst's debut will appropriately unmoor readers, too.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

Starred review from August 1, 2017

A richly written, soak-in-it kind of book, Babst's debut takes us to New Orleans in the days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, revealing the consequences for one beleaguered family. Descended from a freed slave and son of a cabinetmaker whom he's caring for assiduously, artist Joe Boisdore is married to Dr. Tess Eshleman, a white woman from New Orleans high society, and their fraying marriage is totally upended when older daughter Cora refuses to evacuate as Katrina approaches. Cora survives but fears she has done something terrible, and the mystery of what really happened unfolds with breath-holding poignancy throughout the shifting narrative. Meanwhile, Tess links up with past friends while accusing Joe of cowardice for failing to rescue Cora, and younger daughter Del, home from New York, remains crusty with her parents but acts boldly to help her sister. In the end, the hurricane doesn't so much change these people as send them down paths they were already starting to walk, if not always happily, so that finally they live up to the book's last sentence, "I'm home." VERDICT Now you'll know what it was like to have survived Katrina. Occasionally overly detailed but utterly affecting. [See Prepub Alert, 5/22/17.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.