“Micah Perks is one of the most radiantly original writers around. WHAT BECOMES US, exhilarating and terrifying, is a novel I love for its wild beauty, its offbeat inventiveness, its effervescent language, and the artfulness with which it has been shaped. This is a brilliant novel”
“Micah Perks’ wonderful and surprising new novel proves that the life of a small-town schoolteacher can be by turns comic, dramatic, joyful, and violent. For one thing, its wise and observant narrators are unborn twins”
Winner, Independent Publishers Book Award
Finalist, Eric Hoffer Book Awards
Top Ten Apocalyptic Fiction, The Guardian
In WHAT BECOMES US, the new novel by Micah Perks, twin fetuses tell the story of their mild-mannered mother who abandons her controlling husband to start fresh in a small town in upstate New York. But her seemingly ideal neighbors are violently divided by the history Evie is teaching at the high school—the captivity and restoration of colonist Mary Rowlandson, a watershed conflict that leads our little narrators to ask big questions about love, survival, coveting the man next door and what exactly is a healthy appetite.
“Micah Perks’ book has everything a reader could hope for — her language is lively, her characters appealing. Set in a storied landscape, with themes of independence and community. Romance! History! Food! Plus a tale to tell and some surprising people to tell it. There is real magic here. Micah magic! Completely original, completely delightful.”
“No matter where we come from, we all get born again American. Micah Perks is our literary doula working beside the midwives who haunt our American beginnings: Mary Rowlandson, Queen Weetamoo, and civil disobedient missionary Ma — rebirthing us even as we are fetal captives in generational cycles of puritanical pioneering and savagery. We emerge with insatiable hunger, innocent and corruptible, and Micah Perks, with gentle wit and deft storytelling, coaxes us to love and song.”
Top 10 Books About The Apocalypse: "The apocalypses of the past haunt the present in this magical novel narrated by twin foetuses. The ghost of Mary Rowlandson, a white colonist captured by Native Americans during King Philip’s war, has seemingly possessed Evie, a pregnant schoolteacher on the run from an abusive husband. But it’s not only Evie being ghosted – her entire community is bound up in this moment of violent history. “The hem of the world has ripped open,” Rowlandson thinks. “The seam has broken and things I cannot fathom have fallen through.” I can think of no better way to explain an apocalypse." - Michelle Tea at The Guardian
