One day, Angie Voorster—diligent student, all-star swimmer, and Ivy League-bound high school senior-dives to the bottom of a pool and stays there. In that moment, everything the Voorster family believes they Know about one another changes. Katharine Noel's extraor-dinary debut illuminates the fault lines in one family's relationships, as well as the complex emotional ties that bind it together.

Set in a small town in New Hampshire , Halfway House is the story of Angie's psychotic break and her family's subsequent turmoil. Angie is a charismatic young woman-brilliant, witty and passionate-until she swings to manic highs and dangerous lows. Each of her family members responds differently to the ongoing crisis: her father Pieter, a Dutch-born pro-fessional cellist, retreats further into his career; her mother a destabilizing affair with a younger man; her younger brother, Luke, first distances himself as much as possible from his sister, then later drops out of college to be closer to her. And Luke's college girlfriend, Wendy, who comes from a farming town in Iowa , provides an outsider's perspective on the family's teeter toward collapse. The Voorsters manage for a time to maintain a semblance of the normalcy they had “before,” when they were the ideal family; it is not until Angie is finally able to fend for herself that the family is able to truly fall apart and then regather itself in a new, fundamentally changed way.

With grace and precision rarely seen in a first novel, Noel guides readers through a world where love is imperfect and where longing for an imagined ideal can both destroy one family's happiness and offer it redemption.

 

DATHARINE NOEL is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University , where she formerly held a Stegner Fellowship. She lives with her husband, the writer Eric Puchner, and their baby daughter in San Francisco , where she is at work on her second novel.