I would like to choose Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl, but I already chose it for something in this Month of Faves. However, I want you to, when you picture me reading Funny Girl for the first time (a thing I am sure you are all constantly imagining), imagine that I spend the entire time saying, “REALLY. REALLY.” Because that is what happened.

Instead of that, I choose two debut novels that were so remarkably assured and thoughtful that it seemed unlikely these were, in fact, debut novels. These are the wonderfully-titled Make Your Home among Strangers and the awarded-and-accoladed The Turner House. I got both these recommendations from Stacia Brown, who writes on the Act Four blog for the Washington Post, and I will now take sweetly like a lamb any further book recommendations she may want to issue.

And I also choose Elizabeth Eldredge’s book Power in Colonial Africa: Conflict and Discourse in Lesotho, 1870-1960. I know you are thinking that a history book with discourse in the title sounds unbearably dry and tedious, and I am sympathetic to your position. However, in actuality, that book was great, and Lesotho is a baller nation. Perhaps as a function of my low expectations for a history book with discourse in the title, I loved it maybe the best of my four Africa reading project books so far this year.

(Nah. The Congo book was better. But I knew the Congo book was going to be good. That one got rave reviews in the academic journals, and it was highly recommended by another of the writers for the Washington Post‘s Act Four blog, Alyssa Rosenberg.)

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I was just about to hang up on him when he asked, So you hear yet?
–Omar, I told you I’ve been here, but I’m leaving.
–No, I mean the thing at school. The investigation thing. What happened?
–Oh that.

Misunderstanding is central to this book about a first-generation college student attending a prestigious liberal arts university. These are not, by and large, the small misunderstandings of the homonym variety, nor are they the sort of plot-twist misunderstandings that mark a Shakespearean tragedy or your garden-variety romance novel. Make Your Home Among Strangers is about the mutual noncomprehension of two spheres: the low-income Cuban neighborhoods of Miami that made Lizet, and the lily-white liberal world of academia to which she travels.

Lizet belongs to both of these worlds (and sometimes, she feels, to neither), but she can’t translate them to each other. And in any case they are not interested, because they think they already know. Each simply lacks the context that would make it possible for them to understand the other, and Lizet is caught between the two.

Make Your Home Among Strangers is so well-observed it hurts. It does, actually, hurt. Rawlings College requires constant small betrayals of Hialeah Lakes, where Lizet grew up, and returning to Miami requires comparable betrayals of Rawlings. It’s painful to read, because even as you can see that Lizet is making her decisions for the wrong reasons (and possibly making the wrong decisions altogether), you can’t get a clear view of what the right decisions and the right reasons would be.

It’s just a really, really good book, y’all. A debut novel about the way people speak past each other. I’ll be keeping an eye out for Crucet’s future work. Cause damn.

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